An essay of mine, “Sterna Paradisaea” has just been published in Guesthouse, edited by Jane Huffman, a poet I’ve always looked up to. It’s about the philosophy of a particular bird, the arctic tern, and mortality, or all the times I could have died but didn’t. If you asked me about the inspiration for this essay, I couldn’t tell you. I usually start with an idea of the connections I want to make, the structure, but this one just came out of the blue. To understand what was emerging, I printed it out, cut it up, and rearranged it on the floor of my dining room.
Here’s what Jane writes about my essay in her introduction to the issue:
Jaime M. Zuckerman’s essay, “Sterna Paradisaea,” also involves drowning, though the victim is mercifully rescued at the last minute: “The drowning girl hung onto my shoulders, like you would if you were riding on the back of a bird, and pushed my head under. I grabbed her arm and tugged her forward in heaving pulls. Exhausted, she felt like a weight, pulling me under. The salt water choked me, and my lungs burned.” Although the essay circles primarily around the Arctic tern, a seabird with a unique presence in the environment, Zuckerman weaves in several poignant memories, including this treacherous scene at the beach, blurring the line between the natural and human worlds. In this scene, the ocean almost wins.
And here’s an excerpt, but I’d be grateful if you read the whole thing.
Arctic tern as metaphor
The Arctic tern’s migration is longer than any other on the planet. A 2019 study led by scientists from Newcastle University followed terns for three years and found they travel 90,000 km annually, up to 670 km a day: “Over its lifetime, the record-breaking tern could be flying as far as 3 million km between the Farne Islands and Antarctica, the equivalent of nearly four trips to the moon and back.” Mapped over the globe, their roughly s-shaped flight patterns intersect over the Atlantic to form the shape of an infinity symbol. With our lifetimes of heartaches and questions, it’s tempting to affix meaning to this unending journey. How else could we make sense of such a ritual?
When I felt like I’d survived the longest winter, I had an Arctic tern tattooed below the crook of my elbow. Whenever I see it winging away from my body, my arm is always a little extended, the pale of my wrist always upturned, a gesture of offering. Or surrender.
And in the spirit of arctic terns, I want to spend this issue of Notions & Notes thinking about inspiration. Writing this essay wasn’t easy—hours of minutae in wording, hours of tern research—but there were moments, instants really, where an idea just sort of appeared that I can’t really take credit for. I don’t think I’m divinely inspired, but there is a mystical part of the creative process that you can’t force and that I want to puzzle over here. Where art comes from? Art comes from the artist (and years of practice and work), yes, but the inspiration that surprises and baffles and moves seem to come from elsewhere, beyond our ability to understand or explain.
The nine Greek muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory and inventor of language and words, responsible for carrying the oral histories of sagas and myths. Her daughters, the muses, are portrayed as ethereal women, and their stories are always secondary to the men they inspired, such as Hesiod, and the men they birthed, such as Orpheus. Eventually, they would each be ascribed a particular art, but they were initially worshiped as a collective by an ancient cult at Mount Helicon in Greece.
Gods and goddesses represent the invisible, the unfathomable, and as the goddesses of inspiration, the muses represent that inexplicable moment when art comes from a human being. I think of the muses as being that impossible something that elevates a song or stonework beyond the craft and skill needed to make it to be art that has an emotional impact on its audience.
It became tradition to invoke the muse before an epic poem, calling on inspiration, not memory, to guide to the performer. I remember reading aloud the opening lines of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of The Odyssey to a room full of 6th graders, and one shouted out, “that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard” and others just couldn’t explain why they thought it was beautiful. Here’s a photo from my copy of the text margin notes probably made in college.
There are many famous real-life muses, all women who inspired male artists: Warhol’s Edie Sedwick, Dali’s Gala Diakonova, Rodin’s Camille Claudel. The work that depicts these women is absolutely beautiful and fascinatingly layered. Some I particularly love are Andrew Wyeth’s stunning cache of Helga Paintings:
And Kiki de Montparnass:
But in all the public discourse about muses, these women are never credited as collaborators. They are not divine, not gracing these artists with some magic touch of inspiration. They are real women who arrange their bodies, sit patiently, know what they’re doing.
Great art has been made of these women’s bodies, but to be honest, I’m not that interested in the idealization of women as muses. It’s far more intriguing to think of the conversation between the artist and subject, the unspoken, unpainted story of what flies between them.
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is gorgeously filmed, but in the love story between a painter and her model, the narrative is shifted. The muse goes from being object to subject, and she is an active participant in the making of her portrait. In this scene, they are equals in how they study and know the other.
If you haven’t seen this film, do. The intimacy between the two women helps the painting transcend from a likeness to art. So many shots in the film look like paintings themselves. I’m a fan of this Instagram account that finds beautiful shots and highlights their palettes. Here’s one of several from this film.
A Muse
by Reginald Shepherd
He winds through the party like wind, one of the just
who live alone in black and white, bewildered
by the eden of his body. (You, you talk like winter
rain.) He's the meaning of almost-morning walking home
at five A.M., the difference a night makes
turning over into day, simple birds staking claims
on no sleep. Whatever they call those particular birds.
He's the age of sensibility at seventeen, he isn't worth
the time of afternoon it takes to write this down.
He's the friend that lightning makes, raking
the naked tree, thunder that waits for weeks to arrive;
he's the certainty of torrents in September, harvest time
and powerlines down for miles. He doesn't even know
his name. In his body he's one with air, white as a sky
rinsed with rain. It's cold there, it's hard to breathe,
and drowning is somewhere to be after a month of drought.
This song is off Dylan’s first album, recorded when he was only 22, and it’s an incredible song for a debut. He speaks directly to his inspiration, modest in his respect for Woody Guthrie. The last lines, “The very last thing that I’d want to do / is to say I’ve been hitting some hard traveling too,” reflect how humbled he is to be putting forth music in the shadow of his idol. This song has always resonated with me, particularly in how I feel for the authors who’ve influenced me, both as a person and writer.
I’m in the midst of a class in science writing through one of my favorite magazines, Orion, taught by Alison Hawthone Deming. My classmates are all incredible people, and I love it so much when I find my muses in my peers and in what I read. One of our readings was an essay by Amitav Ghosh, which gets at many of the ideas that have been swirling around my head for the last two years. In it, Ghosh draws parallels between colonialism and ecological destruction, both being guided by a sort of exceptionalist ignorance, and he argues that “An essential step toward the silencing of nonhuman voices was to imagine that only humans are capable of telling stories.”
It’s a brilliant essay, and I encourage you to go read the whole thing. I also loved the artist, Matthew Cusick, that Orion paired with the article, so there are some more examples of his work here.
The tremendous acceleration brought about by the worldwide adoption of colonial methods of extraction and consumption has driven humanity to the edge of the precipice.
This compressed time frame has made sure that nonhumans too are no longer as mute as they once were. Other beings and forces—bacteria, viruses, glaciers, forests, the jet stream—have also unmuted themselves and are now thrusting themselves so exigently on our attention that they can no longer be ignored or treated as elements of an inert earth.
Ghosh points to the growing research on how plants and forests communicate to each other in ways inaudible to the human ear, how the bacterial life symbiotically existing in our bodies controls our lives, and how birds like the arctic tern form attachments to place to point out that we’re not the superior beings we think we are.
It may seem obvious to humans that their ability to destroy trees and forests endows them, and them alone, with the capacity to act. But intentional action can also unfold over completely different scales of time. Trees have inhabited Earth much longer than human beings, and their individual life spans are, in many cases, far greater than those of people: some live for thousands of years. If trees possessed modes of reasoning, their thoughts would be calibrated to a completely different timescale, perhaps one in which they anticipate that most humans will perish because of a planetary catastrophe. The world after such an event would be one in which trees would flourish as never before, on soil enriched by billions of decomposing human bodies. It may appear self-evident to humans that they are the gardeners who decide what happens to trees. Yet, on a different timescale, it might appear equally evident that trees are gardening humans. They may be the earthly equivalent of the oceanic superorganism of Solaris.
Ghosh has a sort of call to action for any writers or creators, and I felt inspired by this conclusion to an essay that put into words so much of what I’ve been thinking about for the last few years. This then is the ultimate inversion of the traditional invocation of the muse. The call comes at the end, rather than the beginning, and speaks instead to the audience. Ghosh asks us to listen to the stories of the environment, narratives that come from a place beyond human cognition, from the natural world rather than the divine one.
It is perfectly possible, then, that far from being an exclusively human attribute, the narrative faculty is the most animal of human abilities, a product of one of the traits that humans indisputably share with animals and many other beings—attachments to place. Perhaps, then, storytelling, far from setting humans apart from animals, is actually the most important residue of our formerly wild selves. This would explain why stories, above all, are quintessentially the domain of human imaginative life in which nonhumans had voices, and where nonhuman agency was fully recognized and even celebrated. To make this leap may be difficult in other, more prosaic domains of thought, but it was by no means a stretch in the world of storytelling, where anything is possible.
[…]
This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.