It’s flattery to call my muse a corpse, as she is so much less; having never been alive, she has no still heart, no snuffed out conscious, no darkened lattice of memory, and certainly no legacy of love and caring to echo through time in life’s wake. I call her dead by means of convenience, to call attention to what she has not, to highlight how far she is removed from the dearest possessions of life, and to enshrine her grave indifference with the startling, fearful aspects of what cannot possibly love, and has more in common with sand than the buoyant, striving, animate community of life.
This is the opening blurb of #GoingAlone, appearing in the chapter titled My Muse is a Corpse. My point with this blurb is to point out what my dead muse is not - namely, not alive, also, not real, in addition, nothing to own attribution. My muse is simply my inspiration. My muse is the circumstance and consequence of my decided life and living; the result of my choices to go out there into #Wildness, and to leave behind the security and comfort of my fellows. The muse arise then out of the churning energies of my thinking, enlivened and deadened through strenuous exertion in places from which I may never come back. My muse is my voice is such places, and the words I wind up saying.
Do you have a muse of your own? Where do you find your muse? When does it come to you? And what does it say?
I'll go there today in my mind...and tomorrow in fact...and forever after my time here is done, and I join her nothing for the remainder of eternity.
My name is Kurt Bell.
You can learn more about The Good Life in my book Going Alone.
Be safe... But not too safe.