Roughly around this time three years ago, I helped bat name his 'Genius'. We stumbled on the rather strange name for his innate and wonderful gift as "Being Muse".
It's an odd conjunction of words for a man really.
A Muse is generally considered in classical mythology as female. The Muses were the 9 daughters of Zeus and each brought a special focus to the culture of their mortal subjects below.
Ironically, I named this blog 'aMusing my Genius' only a week or two before we named bat's Genius. Muse was already on my mind apparently, so either, it was a synchronicity that the two of us would employ Muse as a theme in our lives or it was a simple case of associative thinking on my part that happened to be applied by bat to his Genius purely out of his generous nature to my suggestion. He's still not 100% sure that this name we found for his Genius is the "right" name but it rests there even now, in a kind of gentle, subtle, hood-ornament adorned kind of way as to describe the energy of his ephemeral and difficult-to-define gift.
Dick Richard's call to naming ones Genius required one to find a verb to express the action of the gift you carried. The THING that the gift does. This word invariably ends in "ing". There are many words in English that end in "ing", but within the context of searching for a name that will define with singular clarity one's gift, it can make finding that word incredibly difficult.
In bat's case, he IS a sort of male version of Muse. His gift inspires, cajoles, leads, dances, tricks, eludes, conspires, and injects Art into practical reality. Sleight of hand, the sprinkling of spices into a symphonic meal rich with flavour, a trickster who teaches, a wise teacher who seems like a young child too old for his years; 'Being Muse' is a conundrum and sprite who gathers up all the yearning creative spirit of their protege and draws that elusive miracle of Art out of them into the world.
Being is the NOW. When one is being, one is what one is and cannot be anything else outside of that essence. It's not even as corny or as clichéd as Shakespears Hamlet lamenting "To be or not to be?". Being is simple, uncomplicated, unreserved, it's purity in the here and now without another thing besides.
Being Muse. Maybe it's not really the name for bats innate Gift - his Genius - as explained by Dick in that book that began this relationship three years ago! I don't know. Only bat will know when a better name comes along that resonates in his soul like the clear tones of a brass bell tolling from a steeple on a hill.
It is in part, due to bat's gift that I still write in this blog today. 400 posts and rising, I'm slowly building a library of thoughts and stories, musings and rants in part inspired by the conversations, and passing jibes of Muse. My strange and convoluted friendship with bat these past three years has inspired some of these thoughts. Not every artist can claim to know their Muse by name :)
Writing here is also in part my own innate Gift. I called my own Genius name "Constructing Coherence" back then and even now, it still has that slightly pretentious ring to it. It's clumsy but then so am I for the most part. It's convoluted and hardly inspiring but it IS what I "do". I AM about trying to build a view of the world that makes complete sense - at least to me anyway. I am about pasting concepts and ideas together into coherent forms that build new perceptions and new ideologies - new analogies even. I don't always succeed but I am always at it...it's just what I do and it's impossible for me to do otherwise.
aMusing my Genius is the tool I use in the construction of my personal brand of coherence. It is in text that I feel the power of my gift flowing through me. I may not always construct my sentences well but I do occasionally build something that does make sense. I may not always speak clearly in this forum, this blog, but I do build a picture, in words, of the whole. I may look under rugs and beneath floorboards to seek out hidden aspects of truths, slotting these dusty concepts together like building blocks to create wobbly towers of possibility and epic dreams.
When I write in this blog, that is when I am Being. I am utterly in this moment, building the words to make sense of something indefinable and indistinct. I literally stick together metaphors for concepts and ideas that redefine and reshape the original. I am a story-teller crafting a world of ideas from these tools we call Words. It is my essence.
Finding a name for the personal and uniquely special Gift which only you have in all the world, is possibly a Narcissistic exercise in self-aggrandizement or... it is a key to unlocking potential yet to be expressed and explored. Life isn't meant to be the former but it does ask us to know ourselves well enough that we can do the latter. I'm still on my own personal journey of discovery of what it means to "construct" and to "cohere" in the fundamental every day of my Being.
I hope you find the path that's right for you too.
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