Muses to the Muse

Here in New Jersey the summer is upon us. We’re slogging through water-thick air, trying to stay alert in the humidity and heat. Typing at my keyboard is best done in air conditioning or outside in the slight breeze where the shivering cicadas songs wash over and around me like waves.

I do have a suggestion to make the hot summer months more inviting to the muse. In summer, I take my work to a museum. There’s nothing cooler than sitting in a gallery with an open notebook and pen, allowing the paintings, sculpture and hushed, inquiring atmosphere to seep into your consciousness and fill your mind with words. In every painting or sculpture there is a story to be told, waiting only for the avid observer to reveal.

Often I take my children with me. We’re all museum lovers, and live close enough to New York City to make it an easy trip. We travel dark subway tunnels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then trek the few blocks to the Whitney and down on the bus to MoMA before heading home, exhausted and fulfilled. Or sometimes stayed in one gallery for hours.

One of our favorite haunts is in the Met’s Rockefeller Wing. Here amidst the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, we tiptoe from display to display, staring back at wild masks, mimicking the awkward poses of dancing statues, or sitting with our notebooks to write or draw what we think, imagine and see.

You might even catch us (if the guards don’t first), lying our our backs beneath the bark-painted ceiling of the “Ceremonial House” from Papua New Guinea. Looking up at these masterpieces, we try to imagine what it would be like if this was our home and each of those paintings was made by someone we knew. And what if we understood their meanings? All those little symbols – mostly sinuous, symmetrical shapes, but some look like animals – snakes, lizards, birds, monkeys, smiley-faces or monsters with fangs and claws.

When we get kicked out (as we inevitably do), we’re likely to head to the Greek and Roman wing next door. On one visit, we spent over an hour discussing and imagining the lives of ancient Etruscans.

It doesn’t hurt that my family loves myths and ancient cultures. It also doesn’t hurt that Rick Riordan has made Greek and Roman mythology as commonplace as baseball and bicycles in a kid’s world. But I see our visits as a critical extension of a creative education.

In another time in life, some of you know, I was a professional dancer. As part of my early passion, I read everything I could about the early 20th century greats: Pavlova, Nijinsky, Sergei Diaghilev. I recall learning in one biography that Diaghilev, director of the famous Ballets Russes, would encourage his dancers to explore other art forms. They were a traveling company and each city they visited was an opportunity to discover new art, music, architecture, folk dance and culture. Each exposure made them better dancers because they had seen, for example, the passion of an authentic Spanish dance or heard the mournful strains of the Gypsies.

So when I take my kids to the City, or my notebook on my own, I seek out every opportunity to see and experience what we never have before.

And though museums are a fairly safe choice, we are as likely to venture into Central Park. The narrow, twisting stone stairways of Belvedere Castle might as well be a medieval tower. And the glacial striations in the Manhattan schist could have perhaps been made by giant claws.

All of us wind up experiencing sights and points of view we might never have discovered. Inevitably, each of us comes home with a story to write or tell, or at least a tiny detail to add to a 400-page manuscript that makes the writing that much more vibrant and the adventure more real.