My Muse the Avenging Angel

El Kazovszkij, The Great Siren, 2001, © El Kazovszkij Foundation, oil on corrugated cardboard

October 2017

She is called, “The Great Siren”. She was painted in 2001 by the brilliant, eclectic and obsessive Russian-Hungarian artist El Kazovsky, 1948-2008 (Kazovszkij in Hungarian). In the painting, the siren waits atop a mountain, her face obscured, her intentions hidden as her clawed feet dig into the earth and her hooked hands dangle by her sides. The man opposite her is dwarfed, all but annihilated by her vast, menacing shadow. And yet there is something ambivalent about his pose, something almost relaxed. The casually bent knee, the soft arms. His gently flapping flags seem to welcome her. Has she entranced him only to wreck his body on the rocks below? The colours are strong, as they always are in El Kazovsky’s work. He never shied away from reds & oranges or black, but unlike the heavy palate in many of his paintings “The Great Siren” is filled with a pale light and a sense of openness and space that elsewhere he deliberately shunts and curtails.

This is a big painting in every sense of the word. It’s two metres high and over a metre wide. I had the privilege to see it in the flesh at a major retrospective of the artist’s work in Budapest (“The Survivor’s Shadow: The Life & Works of El Kazovsky”, Hungarian National Gallery, November 6, 2015 – February 14, 2016). I remember very well the sensation of standing before it. I felt awed by its raw, unapologetic menace. Kazovsky has said, “I very much like sharp and threatening spaces.” What is this space? What is it like? Physically it seems open-ended, mountains stretching into the vanishing point, vast skies above, but the action of the space seems to imply a compression and limitation of time. In this sense the painting is like an allegory of life on earth and of the creative process. Potentially there is no limit to human imagination, but in reality we are all constrained. By time, by our frailties and fallibility.

There is a quote on my office wall from Amy Witting’s 1999 novel, “Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop”. The protagonist is unwell and she is asked:

“Isobel, are you sure there is nothing you want to talk to me about? No trouble you want to discuss?”

Drink, drugs, kleptomania, men?

Only the Muse. And what a tyrannical, possessive, secretive old witch she is.

My Muse has many things in common with Isobel’s. The O.E.D. definition of a Muse is “a woman, or a force personified as a woman, who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist”. The cliché, with which you’re probably familiar, is the siren as Muse. In this cliché an artistic man of some description is obsessed by a beautiful woman who fuels/thwarts his work and whom he either succeeds in bedding, or not. For all the rest of us the siren as Muse is patently un-real. First and foremost because for many of us our Muses are genderless, or gender neutral, or their gender is obscured or irrelevant. This is interesting in the case of El Kazovsky who was born Elena Kazovskaya, but was openly transgender. He was biologically female but considered himself a man, even though it was tragically a very female disease that killed him. Kazovsky’s early Muse was a young Turkish man named Can Togay with whom he had a fleeting relationship, but whose impact on his work stretched forward in time for decades.

All Muses are an obsession, a compulsion. They may begin as something external to us, but we absorb them, make them part of our obsessive, compulsive natures. A Muse can never remain external to us because we must assimilate them into our imaginations, we must break them down and use them up. But it is not a one-sided affair. The Muse demands and the Muse gets. My Muse is an avenging angel. She’s patient, very patient and disciplined as a general. She’s exacting and mocking too. The girl in me wants praise, the writer in me wants clarity, my Muse wants to avenge cliché, sentimentality, mediocrity and lack of originality. But above all else, my Muse wants truth. Truth, not beauty. Beauty may be a gold standard to aspire to, but beauty is also a trap. We can be blinded by it, fooled into believing that it is itself a kind of truth. But beauty divorced from human truth is only decoration, a delusion, smoke and mirrors.

When my Muse is happy with me, she raises me up on her wings, my earthly concerns fall away, my fears about my work disappear, clarity is mine. It’s like the moments after lovemaking, that peace, that calm, when I want for nothing from anyone. I am whole. ◊