Muse #4: Melpomene

By Paul Roberts

If you’ve been following my blog over the last three months, you’ve grown accustomed to my creative relationship with the nine Muses of Greek Mythology. My dog Cleo aided in my selection this morning. I placed numbered post-it notes on the floor, sticky side up, then I called her over. She sniffed at the papers, reached out with her paw, then walked away trying in vain to shake off the post-it that had attached itself to her tootsies. I helped remove it, turned it over, and thanked her for her choice: Muse #4 on my list, Melpomene, the muse of tragedy.

Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy, was not in the business of telling tragic tales to convince an audience what a terrible place this world can be. Her role was often seen as providing poets and singers the inspiration needed to manage the arrival of grief and loss, loneliness and isolation. How? By sharing their creativity in ways that helped move individuals and communities to a place of wholeness after times of darkness and tragedy. Melpomene, my tragic muse, can inspire my creative outlets during these dark winter months when Spring can seem so far away.

I recently had some conversation with my own personal Shakespeare expert, retired Lane Community College literature professor, Bill Woolum. I’m sure he would cringe at my referring to him as an expert, but he answers all the questions I have about the Bard and his writings, so for me, he fits the description.

If I recall the conversation correctly, one of the consistent qualities of Shakespeare’s tragedies, according to Professor Woolum, is the ever-growing isolation of the title characters. There is a pervading loneliness that is experienced by characters like Macbeth, or Hamlet, or Othello. It is that distinct lack of human togetherness that ultimately leads to the tragic ending for those characters.

Christian writer Henri Nouwen addresses this isolation and loneliness in his work “The Wounded Healer,” and his thoughts keep sticking in my mind. Like a post-it stuck to my tootsies. Nouwen writes “the main task of a minister (I think friend, husband, father, etc.) is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because of the false supposition…that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt.”

Nouwen seems to suggest in “The Wounded Healer” that isolation and loneliness grows to tragic proportions when we fail to recognize the ways in which tragic circumstances tie us together in community, and instead allow those feelings separate us.

Melpomene, Nouwen, Shakespeare, and Professor Woolum all help to remind me that each day, as I continue to come to terms with my own times of loneliness and isolation, my own experience makes me better able to help others do the same. I can discover each day that in my loneliness, I am not alone.

“The master is coming–not tomorrow, but today, not next year, but this year, not after all our misery is passed, but in the middle of it, not in another place but right here, where we are standing.” (Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer)    

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Share your thoughts on allowing your creativity to take you through a difficult time in your life.

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