Gremlin in a Tutu
My muse is like a gremlin in a tutu: cute but aggressive. It says to me, ‘holy smoke, it’s 5am, get to the desk.’ This happens in intensive creative phases and means I am exhausted most of the time. Earlier this month I decided that it was untenable and decided to do something about it.
I told a friend about my gremlin in a tutu, and that I felt it was persecuting me. She said maybe it’s that part of me that so urgently wants to create that if I don’t let it, it gets angry, or feels ignored, and because I often ignored that part of me in the past, it is really making its presence felt these days.
That may be. It began to calm down after I had been swimming and done some housework. My brain calmed down to the point where I had to just go to bed. Negotiation with my hectoring gremlin is tiring.
Lying in bed, I realised that the force of the gremlin is untameable, and there is no reasoning with it, but that maybe I could contain it. If I made offerings and created some ritual around it.
At the moment I am listening to a reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey by a teacher who actively worships Hermes and other Greek gods. I was taken aback when I learnt this, but have since thought about it a lot. A female artist I am researching for my book about childlessness, Meinrad Craighead, created a morning ritual in which she lit a fire and offered water and earth to the Mother Goddess (she was Christian and her God was female) before she started work. Another friend of mine, an artist called Red K Elders, who lives here in Norfolk, before she starts a new piece of work, and if she gets stuck, offers libations to the gods and goes out on to the marsh to worship and pray through dance and song and movement.
Red said, when I told her I was writing about this: ‘The Muse is incessant, and will thrash us mercilessly, both when we do and when we don’t succumb to Her. But all of it is glorious. It’s what we came here to do, right?’
With all this in mind, I went to my study and performed a radical act - I tidied. I entirely cleared the route across the room to my desk - no small job. I left my desk clear for the next day, swept the ash from my stove and arranged things more prettily around it. I got a basket of wood up from the outside shed. I lined up the candles. Cleansing, preparation, heat, power. The office was ready for action. I could feel my gremlin calming.
I slept longer that night, and in the morning, when I lit the fire, I imagined I was making offerings to the gods. When I sat at my desk, there was no fight for my gremlin. Since that day, a few weeks ago, I have not performed this preparatory ritual every night and morning but it was enough to acknowledge the gremlin, to honour it, and make space for the work to be done.