LOVE TOXIC

I don't recall uncorking the bottle, but as the syrupy liquid fills the glass it sparkles and dances in a thousand crystal triangles of winter, washed and blended gold and jasmin. I drink the ice-cold albari?o, refill my glass and drink again. I go back to the sofa syrupy full. Her shadow passes before me, swiping the room to before and after. Gabriela fills her glass, sits on the floor and stares at me through spectral stone washed eyes I first fell in love with eight years before. Since then, I have come to know her manners for each of her personalities, her quick-fire contrariety, her swift intellect and her sensual beauty. She is strong enough to withstand what life throws at her but quick to fold when her heart is empty. I have seen her crush people close to her and be crushed by them. I have seen her scream and I have seen her tremble. At one turn she would feel the world treated her unfairly, at the next she would take what she wanted. Her long hair, touched by a golden energised wave and her scampish smile can dazzle; but when she is troubled, as if pursued by life's unseen jailer, her eyes glare, her hair swishes lifelessly forward to cover her face and she is gone. Rebels like her expose our inherent egoism which we use to protect ourselves in an over-accelerated society ?lled with shame and violence. To me, she lives the most uncomfortable of truths, stripping us bear of our own conceit and deceit about who we are and what we do, and for these mixed blessings and her unquenchable thirst for adventure, she is the muse for my writing. As we enter this third decade, I am emerging victorious from prostate cancer, wild love, and I am publishing this anthology of poetry. A fourth thread adds to my fresh, personal perspective with the letters of TS Elliot to his muse released into the public domain. I find comfort and coincidence in reading about his relationship to his muse Emily. Elliot pursued her and said he would marry her but later changed his mind, fearing a veil would be cast over the internal, private source of his poetic inspiration. There is no way I could have written "Love Toxic" without Gabriela; her magical influence, the wonderful feelings and self-inflicted distress she produced in me fuelled by her quixotic ways and anxieties. Labelling trauma doesn't limit the damage to a woman prey to excess to ease her naturally heightened vision and intuition. To be love-struck is dazzling, energizing and complete, but it also creates a reverse toxicity in the stricken. Casting judgment doesn't come into it. The need to hold on until I had understood why I had such intense, opposing and often irrational feelings does.The ancient muses were representations of the fountains of knowledge. Nowadays, the definition of a muse as a creative inspiration is misleading. For a world increasingly unwell and anxious, Creativity is exhausting Science and being exhausted by it. Our fountain of knowledge has not off-set our ability to mess things up. Always a thing of beauty, the muse is above all, thrilling and terrifying, traumatic and able to traumatise, superbly judgmental and deplorably open to being judged. The muse is not created by the artist but is waiting faithfully in the wings to be woken by creative agency and empowered through poetic or painted imagery to illuminate those who will be illuminated. My lasting impression and what I have tried to capture in my poetry is summed up in Elliot's letters to Emily when he says: "...though (our love) is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest loss and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy." However, as a psychologist once told me, "You can't discover America twice", and by the same token Elliot came to see: "that my love for Emily was the love of a ghost for a ghost." By that, I think he means complete.Iain McLean