Saunders--My Muse

My muse I see as an androgynous brother/sister, a shape-shifting twin that is a more beautiful, more delicate, more magical and much stronger version of the self I present to the world. My relationship with my muse is troubled. I feel separate from him/her in that I don’t feel worthy of what s/he calls me to do; I sense s/he calls me to do something im-portant, and I don’t feel up to the task. I am troubled by the thought that my abilities and “gifts” are too banal, too ordinary to rise to what, in some general, nebulous way, I sense my muse is calling me to be and to make. On the one hand I live well-situated in my imaginal world—I meet the world through feeling, through a kind of strongly kinesthetic response to it, and on the other hand I don’t believe strongly that I have what it takes to develop the implied sensibilities of this response into something I could look at with pride or with satisfaction, or even with a sense of amusement.

My body and my muse—I feel androgynous, a real mixture of masculine and feminine, and I feel comfortable with that. I’m attracted to maleness more than to femaleness, though I like the mixture of male and female in other men. I have a mostly poor body image, seeing especially my face as VERY ugly, seeing my body as just sort of shapeless. The only part of my body I like at all is my legs, which are muscular, dancer’s legs. I like their strength, though they some-times also look very ugly to me. My mouth, my lips and my eyes are the parts of myself that feel closest to my muse—images, speaking and feeling the vibration of singing or speaking all being closest to what my muse does, which is to see and to speak. My muse's body seems to me to be the perfection I would want to hope for in my literal body, a perfection I know I could never actually see realized.

How committed am I to developing my imagination? This is the question I wrestle with every day, having chosen to center my life around the daily STRUGGLE to keep writing, to keep inventing. I call upon my muse, and I am terrified of what it obliges me to try. Is that commitment?

Moral and social claims: I believe my muse calls me to write what I understand to be true to experience. I feel called upon to write about people and their experience of the world, their response to the world as it is and to their sense of what ideals mean. To the extent that I am being true in my writing to expressing what I know about these types of experience, I believe I am fulfilling my muse’s moral and social claims on me. My muse sees the world from a pretty earthy perspective—s/he sees people naked, up close, fuck-ing and crying and sweating. S/he also sees the landscape where these people are situated.