I thought I owed it all to Typewriter Series #1.
It began there, really, this wild life, this strange wandering existence meeting more people, in more places, than I could have ever imagined meeting. It began with the writing of a single poem in a small antique store, pecking it out on a mostly-broken but still functioning typewriter that was built sometime in the 1920s.
Step back though, just a bit back, and I see something else, I see a truth bigger than the rest. I see, with unflinching certainty, that it all began because of her.
The other day, I somehow stumbled onto an old familiar internet haunt, the still beautiful (if extremely random) Tumblr.com and I found a post that immediately made me stop, ponder, and then say “Huh, exactly!” The post basically said, that if you go back and look at any great artist—be they writer, filmmaker, painter, whatever—and then somehow also cross-reference that to the presence of someone they loved desperately, the quality and potency of the work almost always corresponds. Almost exactly. Basically, and I’m sure there are exceptions here, somewhere in their orbit, all artists have a muse that is more than just a little responsible for the beauty in their work.
I’ve always written, always had words inside me that needed to find their way out, but I know now, it was never like this. Not really.
Meeting Sarah changed everything. It didn’t just plant more words inside that would one day blossom big enough to need sunlight on the exterior of me, it did much more. In truth, it was the impetus to open the strange conduit in my soul to the great big everything. It was a bore hole six thousand times bigger than any I’d ever had, the diameter of that conduit growing to black hole scale, pulling in everything within a grabbable distance to my gravity and transforming it into poetry. Into art.
I think great love, great loss, great adventure create great art. I think there’s always a muse behind the scenes of things, and it’s not always what we imagine it will be. Sometimes it is a person, sometimes it is a place, sometimes it is a tragedy, sometimes it is a journey taken, but always simmering beneath the surface there is a quiet metronome to the process of all that creation.
My prolific explosion began with this soft ticking, the sound of a voice I didn’t know my ears had been waiting to hear. It began with being seen, truly, for the first time, because I was loved as I was, precisely, and knew that I would be safe there. Finally safe.
The Tumblr post was a bit more pointed than this essay, saying that in particular there exists a pattern in the lives of male creatives. They believed there was a rhythm to it, that could almost always be stripped back to the presence of a powerful woman in their orbit. They believed their great art was great because it was being edited, touched, transformed behind the scenes by these women who these men loved. They pointed at Tim Burton, at George Lucas and the re-edit of the Star Wars trilogy that may have saved it before it even began, and while I do agree, I think it also misses the bigger picture: That all great art has invisible hands behind it, that all great works are not solely coming from within the artist, but through someone else, too.
I think of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, I think of John Steinbeck and his third wife Elaine, I think of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, of so many who have created so many works we all cherish and still adore, and I see a thread common and enduring:
The art we create is shaped by those who shape our souls.
We cannot create in total isolation, we cannot create as islands. We create through the love we feel, the solidity we find, through the wounds we incur and tend to, the people who touch our lives. The closest relationships, the muses we are graced with, do not just influence what we make, they directly shape why we’re making it in the first place.
For longer than I haven’t I’ve known this, though I think sitting here and typing today, I understand it in a way I previously was incapable of, to a degree I couldn’t quite reach. I think I see that it’s not just the art, it’s not just the output or the final product, it’s more, and it always has been.
I think it’s not the art we create that is shaped by the muses in our lives, it’s our souls themselves, and the art is only a byproduct, only a side-effect, a consequence of their presence. We create because we are, and what we are comes so much more from who and what we love than anything else.
I’ve long said, we’re here to love, nothing more, and I stand by this. All else comes from it, all else always will.
You being here today, reading these words, engaging with this beautiful community, is not because I wrote Typewriter Series #1. It’s not because of the years and years of Daily Haiku on Love that preceded it, not because of The Never Was after it all. You’re here because I found someone that made me feel alive, feel seen, feel safe, appreciated for being this me, and only this me. You’re here because of her, really, and I’ve no problem admitting this. I’ve always called myself a conduit, not a conductor, that I channel what comes into what it will be, so this realization, this leap forward is a simple one.
I just know now, the conduit I am was shaped, carved out, created, by the love I found, embraced, believed in.
By her.
