Step 1: Spend time with artists. Find out where the writers, artists, and musicians in your town spend time and become a regular there.
You can’t inspire them if they can’t find you. Consider, perhaps, attending all the openings at the art school. If you are nineteen, you might wish to wear exceptionally unflattering clothes –overalls under giant thrift store slips, etc.– to put a fine point on the fact it doesn’t matter what you wear. You might shave your head or keep your hair and make a nest of it, in which you arrange false birds, small pieces of paper, plastic forks, and toothpicks. Artists need texture.
Stand near the food table, perhaps making towers out of bright orange cubes of cheese. Muses do not spend time mooning around, waiting to be noticed. You can look back to antiquity and see that muses are always busy, doing things like dancing, holding flutes and lyres, gazing at scrolls…building edifices with cheese.
While I played with cheese, I hoped an art professor who sometimes flirted with me in the library would get me a glass of the boxed white wine they were serving, but instead, a boy who looked like a foreign film and smelled like old cooked rice walked up and asked if I liked cheeses or sausages better. He asked if I liked it when dogs visited me. He asked if I was the one with the blond hair (I was). He told me he came from Brazil, but he was really Polish (but really he was Brazilian), and in a few more steps, which I’ll elide for concision, he was waking me up at 3 a.m. to take photographs of me crouching naked in his closet (because the light was interesting) and squeezing blood from my finger onto celluloid, which was later shown as film at an art installation where a naked man named Craig nailed a chicken carcass to the wall and screamed, “IT’S A CIVIL WAR, MAN!” I cut my finger opening a can of black beans while the filmmaker was at the kitchen table scratching celluloid with stickpins. I had been making a version of quick feijoada I had adapted from his mom, who every month sent him chocolates and soccer magazines in Portuguese and called him pet names that all sounded like “Missy,” and called me something in Portuguese that translated to “the girl.” Later, shortly before we broke up for reasons I can’t remember, he made a film that he said was about me, in which a yellow-haired Salvation Army doll in a tattered dress was washed down a meager stream, catching in roots and getting free again, until finally she hit a rock she never got past.
Step 2: Be uninhibited. A muse helps the artist think beyond the confines of everyday life.
Think about Edie Sedgewick and Yoko Ono. Think about Dora Maar. Think about yourself, perhaps licking a painting, crawling under desks to listen to footstep echoes at parties, or sliding down into empty drainage ditches to touch the moss that grows on just one side of the underbridge near the park. If you are newly divorced, you may be in a tent with your four-year-old daughter at a music festival in south Texas. You may emerge from the tent, just twenty-six-years-old with your tiny daughter clinging to you, both of you dressed for a party on some other planet, to find a folk singer/songwriter from Boston sitting in a camp chair. You may know he is a little famous, but you pretend you do not, because artists are intrigued by their own anonymity. Instead of recognizing him, instead of introducing yourself, you could ask him to make you a gin and tonic with ice cubes from a cooler and pocket-knife-cut limes. Artists are inspired by being treated like the help. You might subsequently find it is most expedient to spend a day at the Guadalupe River, cataloging for the musician the textures of slick rocks that he thinks are all just undeviating viridescent slime. You will introduce a revelatory universe of laurel frondescence, density, scum, and pockmarks. You could meet unexpected underground ledges that suck the height out from under you. You may lounge then, on flat rocks, while he amuses your daughter in the water and you can be quiet for a moment, finally, and think.
After the folk festival, this folksinger flew from Boston to Oklahoma to visit me for a weekend in my little house while my daughter was with her father. We performed minor sex acts that seemed to require an inordinate about of labor on my part. Then, I made scones while he played the guitar.
A few exhausting phone calls and emails later, there was a song about me. He wrote: “She’ll touch you where you want to break.” Reflecting on this, I realize that a surprising number of artists want you to touch them where they want to break. And the thing a surprising number of artists want broken is their penis, or what their penis stands for, and if they don’t want you to break it, not exactly, they at least want to be able to blame you when it doesn’t work.
Step 3: Be sexual. Sexual arousal can help spur creativity, since it lowers inhibitions and charges the body and brain with erotic energy.
You may find you have painted your bedroom walls a particularly vaginal pink to make your ex-husband move out. You may have decoupaged 1950s recipes, Loteria cards, and typed dictionary definitions to your dresser, which serves also as an altar and, to a lesser extent, a bedside table. You may send your daughter to her grandmother’s early on a Saturday afternoon, so you have plenty of time to hypnotize yourself. You might put sandalwood and rose oil on your thighs and brush aster and frangipani dust into your hair. You may want to concentrate yourself, let everything slide away except your hot pulsing core so, for the next few hours, you are a single purpose, one shivering thought. These ablutions may be in advance of a date with a new media poet who has just accepted a teaching job in Australia. He might smell like Winston’s and Listerine strips. You might find this, in addition to his height, mesmerizing, but it won’t matter because you are drunk on your own skin.
This poet walked into my house with orange juice and flowers and an envelope filled with five $100 bills. He handed me the flowers and put the orange juice in the refrigerator. When I tried to refuse the money, he left it in the freezer with the spilled bags of frozen peas. I pretended I didn’t see the envelope go from his hand to the freezer, that I didn’t know it was there. It sat there, getting colder, for several days before I took it out and put it in the bank, where it came to room temperature, blending with my other money to pay bills and buy new shoes.
That night, though, I sat on the edge of the kitchen counter, sliding my skirt up my thighs, and drew him between my legs, twining calf and arch around his legs, taking his measure with the skin inside my anklebones. It was easy then, melting the border between our bodies and pulsing him in. We never went on the date he’d asked me on, and instead spent all night in my pink bedroom, which he didn’t notice was pink until the next morning when finally, raw and dehydrated, we woke up and went to The Diner to eat oatmeal and toast and display our sense of shared genius for having discovered we could fuck like that. He gave me his car, which I drove until just last year, and a few weeks later he moved to Australia. He sent me birds of paradise and jealous emails and wrote a poem about me that began, “Her purpose is akin to paper.”
He made a video of himself masturbating in Australia and staring into the camera and sent it to me. He sent me another video in which he detailed, again from Australia, and again to the camera, my shortcomings. After not many more days, a few hundred dollars in landline calls, and a cancelled plane ticket, this too was over, though I’ve dreamed about meeting him in a haunted house several times in the years that have passed.
Step 4: Have original style. An artist’s muse is not just a model or mannequin, but a source of original energy and life.
You do not need to be lithe or angular, though it helps, but you must look interesting, like you are covered in physical and metaphorical gossamer, cauls, and veils that most likely sheath the very ephemeral and absent thing the artist is sure he requires to be whole. He may suspect he sees his mother’s love nestled in your solar plexus, or his child-joy in your sternal notch. You may find he taps out the hologram of the more generous chambers of his own heart between your breasts, or infers his father’s approval from a subluxation in your spine. The essential thing about your covering is that it conceal the plain fact that only your living body rustles underneath.
I returned to the art school gallery in my late 20s, this time wearing a black faux-fur-trimmed off-the-shoulder sweater that was a gift from a friend in Brooklyn, who found it being sold on the street near her apartment and bought one for each of us. I wore it with a skirt so short I had to give myself a pep talk to leave the house.
You can add fishnets, or tights in a shade of vermillion or silver. Whatever is on your legs, your boots should be black and tight and to your knees, at least. They don’t have to be expensive. You will find that, though you are older, you are still young enough that when your legs are checked, it is not for authentic leather or quality stitching.
I felt like the Cold War, like a spy, clicking around the gallery floor on a Sunday evening, old enough to collect my own free wine. My best friend was an art student and she had painted a large format picture of me, faceless and shirtless, wearing a long gray skirt and lying in my pink bedroom with Sylvia Plath’s words painted across what she imagined was the old brag of my heart: “I am I am I am.”
I stood near the painting with her, listening to professors ask her questions about process and influence, and I wondered if they recognized me prostrate on the canvas. A printmaking and digital art professor with an ex-smoker’s voice and shaky hands touched my arm and said, “I’ve seen you around.” He said, “Are you an artist, or what?” He put air quotes around “around” and “artist” and winked. He scratched my phone number on his hand in blue pen and, in a few more steps, which I will elide for concision, we were engaged, and I was writing his tenure portfolio.
A few steps after that, he may have threatened to kill you and your family if you left his house. He may even have stood in the doorway and pushed you to the floor when you reached for the doorknob. He grabbed your arm and shook you, telling you that it is because he loves you so much that he acts like this. You might have chosen to try again to leave, right then.
You might, but I didn’t. Instead, I took his face softly in my hands and said that I was sorry. I led him to his bedroom and lowered my body over his until he came. When I was sure he was asleep, I left through the front door.
If you are still there in the house, you should find a way out too. You might have your car outside, or you may walk all the way home carrying your shoes with your damp underwear in the pocket of your jacket. You may find that you feel not only relieved, but elated, bursting with invincibility. You may have found your art.
Step 5:Make your own art. When you’re intimately familiar with how creativity ebbs and flows you can help someone else who is struggling.
The best muses seem to have something else going on, a project, a sense that they are there, but life is elsewhere. You can look at examples all the way back to mythology and all the way up to the poor, forever-defenestrating wives of modern art’s avant-garde. They are too busy for you; in your hands, but just out of your grasp.
Me? I eventually lost my appetite. For artists, and for the galleries of their images of me.
Suddenly, my face had collected enough years to be its own costume and further, I no longer cared to have it drawn, photographed, or painted. These days, I sometimes forget I have a face at all. In flat shoes and glasses, I write notes to myself in ink that becomes less invisible as it multiplies, fading in reverse until I turn inside out, telling the stories I didn’t realize I knew were all around me.
Sarah VanGundy lives and works in Moscow, Idaho. Her previous essays have been published in Harvard Review, [PANK], and The Offing. Her essay “Memento Mori” was named a “Notable” in The Best American Essays 2019 and she was a 2018 Pushcart nominee.