When Rena came out of that darkened doorway at 3:00 A.M. she did her best not to ask me to help her. Severely abused children often make a vow they will never cry for help, no matter what. They will keep that vow till their dying day. Within this vow is their untouched perfect self. No one gets to see this person. To say;

“Please help me!”

Destroys the tabernacle. If Rena is dying, she will not seek help. However, she will let someone know, is code, in a very disguised way, because, to die alone if very frightening.

Rena finds me after a very long and far away time. She sends me a letter with no address or phone number. She does not ask for my phone number. She has sent a message outside the tabernacle. She has established th rules of how we are going to communicate. We are not going to have a initimate relationship. She will not be my muse in residence. She does however, want to be enshrined in ‘The Muse Hall of Fame’.

When we know we are going to die, we wonder if we are going to be remembered. When I do not respond with the cool respect of a mortician, and suggest I will be here for her when her husband dies. I have broken the vow of the tabernacle. I have turned Rena’s words…….into a cry for help! I have destroyed everything. Why am I not showing her husband any respect?

I can’t respect a man who lets his wife work as a janitor so he can play cowboy.
Take away the nameless cowboy, who Rena does not name, and, the guard is gone. The truth can now get in.

“My husband has serious health issues that are worrying for me, but, which I can do nothing about. He has a small herd of cattle, and does some farming, but I can forsee his ill-health may curtail or end these extremely arduous endeavors.”

Why wasn’t Rena cooking for her husband on Christmas Day? Does he have kinfolk they could have gone to? How about friends? Is he as much a loner as Rena? I offer to help this nameless man. I post a drawing for the house I designed for this lonesome couple. I am destroying the tabernacle.

“It would be nice to hear from you, but I must not embark on an affaire of the heart. My husband would be very hurt. And angry.”

“And angry.” is added later. Why? Because without Rena leaves a window open, that she shuts, but not all the way. Here was a perfect time to use her husband’s name.

“Bob would be very hurt. And angry.”

There is no husband. Rena goes on to say how hard she works. She ignores the suggestion that there is money to be had from out story, that could come to the rescue, could be…..of help!

There is that word again, the destroyer of the tabernacle. Rena did go for help, to a friend that helped her put the destroyed letter back together before they went to the sheriff. This must have taken a very long time. Where is the husband? Why didn’t this tough farmer and cowboy get upset and make an angry call to me? If Rena got my address off the net, then she has my number.

I love you Rena, and always will. And I know these words are to most forbidden of all. You are breaking my heart – again!

Greg

How Creative Artists Court the Muse

By DINITIA SMITH
Published: June 30, 1996

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN artist and muse is intuitive, private, visceral, complex.

It is most notable in the visual arts, of course: an artist like Picasso might spend decades painting the same model, often a wife or lover, obsessively exploring her many facets. But muses inhabit the performing arts just as potently, and their impact is no less crucial or revealing. Choreographers speak of choreographing their work “off” an individual dancer, and the expression is apt. George Balanchine invented some of his greatest ballets for Suzanne Farrell, the dancer he called “my alabaster princess.” For her he created “Mozartiana” and “Don Quixote,” with Ms. Farrell representing Balanchine’s own unrecoverable youth and beauty.

Over the years, the director Martin Scorsese has used the same group of actors — Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel — as vehicles for his cinematic vision. In movies, says Mr. Keitel, “you’re always playing the director, who’s always playing you.” As Mr. Scorsese puts it, when working with them, “I don’t have to say anything to these guys.” Through these men, Mr. Scorsese, who is small and asthmatic, becomes the tough guy he could never be growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

For 11 years, the chief muse for the choreographer Bill T. Jones has been a 290-pound man named Lawrence Goldhuber, who was an untrained dancer when he began performing. Mr. Goldhuber’s monologue on the death of his mother is a compelling part of “Still/Here,” Mr. Jones’s 1994 work about terminal illness. Mr. Jones says Mr. Goldhuber reminds him of “the fat black women dancing in those African dance classes when I was in college.”

“Their sexuality was complete,” says the choreographer.

Sometimes the relationship has deeply familial echoes. The choreographer Trisha Brown, 59, has been working with the dancer Diane Madden, 37, for 16 years. To Ms. Brown, Ms. Madden is simply “my daughter.”

And the playwright Sam Shepard has found in a succession of actors, among them Ed Harris and James Gammon, the contained violence of his late father, an alcoholic who left his family. Mr. Shepard wrote “Fool for Love” for Mr. Harris, and Mr. Gammon has played a series of hard-drinking father figures in Shepard plays, most recently on Broadway in “Buried Child,” which runs through today. “You feel somehow related, emotionally and psychically,” Mr. Shepard says of these actors, “as though you had a blood tie. You recognize patterns.”

The relationship can offer a creative artist both inspiration and a means to express that inspiration. It is almost as if the creative artist need hardly finish a thought, so completely and intuitively does the performer grasp it and find ways to express it. The relationship can be so strong that one can hardly separate the roles of the participants; it is impossible to tell the dancer from the dance.

Although the relationship between artist and muse can drive the creative process and enhance it, perhaps because of its very intensity the relationship is often fraught with danger. Even under the most amicable of circumstances, there can be pain when the relationship ends. Mr. Goldhuber won’t be dancing with Mr. Jones this season because of an injury, and since Mr. Goldhuber is 35, old for a dancer, the two may never perform together again. “Where do we go now, since work is so central to our friendship?” Mr. Jones asks. “We have to learn new ways to be.”

The more intense the relationship, the more bitter the separation when it occurs. And when sex is a component of the relationship, as is so often the case, the ending can be catastrophic. In the actress Mia Farrow, Woody Allen created a feminine surrogate of himself, perpetually young, innocent and bewildered. But when a series of much-publicized domestic complications ended their personal relationship, the professional one exploded, too.

The artist-muse relationship seems to endure longest when there is personal distance between the two parties. Although Mr. Shepard jointly owns a race horse with Mr. Harris and Mr. Gammon, and though the three men talk regularly on the telephone, they live in different parts of the country: Mr. Shepard in Minnesota, Mr. Gammon in Florida, Mr. Harris in California. “I don’t know if in the real world I consider him a friend,” Ed Harris says of Mr. Shepard.

When Mr. Shepard and Mr. Gammon get together, says Mr. Gammon, “I don’t really talk to Sam about his characters. We talk about horses.”

Here is how three pairs of artist-muse relationships play themselves out in work and in life.

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro: A ‘Primal Connection’

Martin Scorsese has received co-writer credit on a number of his films, including “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” but even the films he has not written bear the imprint of his collaboration with his actors. Many key scenes are improvised by actors he has worked with repeatedly, with the director standing by reacting to their words and editing them.

As is so often the case when a creative artist meets a performer who will come to embody a personal vision, Mr. Scorsese vividly remembers the exact day he met Robert De Niro, at Christmas dinner at the house of a mutual friend in 1970. “Bobby said: ‘I know you from Elizabeth Street. You used to be with Joey and with Robert.’ He even knew the nicknames of the organized-crime figures.”