Muses 1

I’ve read books with muses in them. Poems, too. 

I’ve studied ancient mythology, so I know the supposed origins of the muses, near Mount Helicon and Mount Olympus. Also their names, although I can’t recite them all, but the group of nine are the source of inspiration for the liberal arts, including poetry, and for the sciences. It’s not necessary to list their names and all the times they’re cited through the ages, but since we still refer - laughingly - to them today, they deserve a thought or two.

A muse brings ideas to the human who strives to create a work of art or make a scientific discovery. The human hopes to make something new, and something good, beautiful. Even if the human isn’t aware of it, beauty is much a part of the desire for creation. The Chilean avant-garde writer Vicente Huidobro called the poet a small god in that the true poem lay in originality, not copying what was in museums already.

There is no need to debate this question, which crosses over all the areas of philosophical thought and defies definition: What is good? What is new? What is beautiful? No, I’m not going there, so you can relax. My goal, which you should already have guessed, is much more modest. I only aspire to making something decent, a story or a painting that people might enjoy. That implies some sort of originality in thinking, yet I’m not sure I even want to achieve that. For example, I read like a fiend, a book a day or more, not all of them good, but at least they’re books. From those readings I mix and match, stick one thing onto another, cry over sad endings and rejoice over the happy ones. In other words, I just shuffle the parts and particles until they stick together in a unique new form nobody has made before. Maybe Huidobro was right and I am a little goddess. [Do not take that statement seriously.]

You should know that I’m not classist, especially given my origins, so where I differ from others plying the creator craft is in my materials. In my use of language, my native speech pushes me toward people with whom holding a conversation is comfortable, or fun, or eye-opening. If I make references to music in my writing, it’s never opera or even jazz. My upbringing only knew square dancing, rock and roll, things like that.

I don’t have a muse; I’ve got a critic on one shoulder and an editor on the other. If I can run the gauntlet and emerge intact on the other side, then I’m satisfied. Maybe I have gone through life muse-less for some time now because there were no muses for fiction in the group of nine. Apparently, fiction would not be a thing until centuries later. Short stories and novels are latecomers to the literary scene. Nevertheless, I have plodded along, trying to weave tales that can captivate an audience and often, just like now, falling into tired descriptors or stale metaphors. It’s a need, it’s an impulse, it’s what happens when you live with your nose stuck in a book or on a screen. When the visual book fails, there’s also the audio one, which takes up the slack when I must keep my eyes on the road or am trying to fall asleep.

I have to keep writing, for better or for worse. Write or die, like Annie orders Paul Sheldon to do in Misery. I am my own Annie, in a way, which is kind of frightening. That woman is the worst excuse for a muse that a writer could have!

That said, I’d like a muse in my life. And don’t laugh, but my muse would be ambiguous in sex, both male and female, or neither male or female. This requires a brief explanation, because lots of times my readers don’t understand me.

Don’t try to create some theory about my sexual orientation when I am merely explaining why my muse needs to be ambiguous, double, even trans. Choosing a muse is obviously not about sexuality and feeling attracted to a person. That’s true even though in the past male artists were said to have attractive female muses and one seemed to seduce the other. That way the male, fertilized by the female, gave birth to art and the female was both inspiration and object of contemplation. In laywoman’s terms, especially since the sixties, the woman was not considered to be an actor, a maker; she was, in the words of the great Virginia Woolf, ‘killed into art’, the very art she had inspired.

But my relationship with a muse, as I’ve imagined it, comes from my observation that sometimes we seek comfort, encouragement, or just closeness, from a person of the same sex and sometimes we turn to the other sex. That’s like when a little girl runs to mommy after falling and scraping a knee or a woman calls her best friend to talk to her about a serious problem. Or a little boy turns to his father to learn how to identify constellations, then a young man confesses his doubts about joining the military to an uncle, seeking advice. In each of these cases, under different circumstances, the child might choose the opposite sex to speak with, and so the young woman or man can seek out a person of the opposite sex when in need. 

That is key, for me. A need. [Note to self: too much assonance here. Focus on what you mean and please do not repeat the obvious.]

I have turned to both female and male persons in times of need, which is why my muse, if I had one, must have characteristics of both. Apparently I want an all-purpose muse, kind of like all-weather tires for cars. I don’t want a hermaphrodite, or don’t need one. What I envision as my muse is a person who can be outfitted to appear more masculine or more feminine. The relationship with a muse is never intimate, so I’m just referring to hair, make-up, clothing. At the same time, my muse, although disexual (my term), may not even possess a body. Could a muse be more of a phantom? All my mother’s family believed in the spirit world, aka ghosts, and many stories grew up around the ones who had gone to the netherworld. 

I had to resist the temptation to walk in the valley of the shadow of death, as one book says, and not slip into muse easy mode. My goal was to just forge ahead, beating on word doors wherever I found them, which was everywhere. The stories of Poe and those of the Hull family were not going to raise me up, as the song says. If I had to get assistance, I wanted only a muse of grade A quality, guaranteed to work, to run smoothly when summoned. It’s not hard to see that this was unrealistic on my part. I don’t have anybody in my corner of the ring, but I know what I would have if it were in my power…

It wasn’t my intention to get so off track about my ideal muse, which might be a reason my writing has its challenges. Still, it seems necessary to include the above introduction if I am to explain my method of invoking this being of many forms and appearances. It is true that I pay (too much?) attention to details, so that writing a novel has been impossible, despite all my tears and years of trying.

After giving up many times, then dragging myself up to my desk yet again, there is a place that both feeds my ADHD and forces me to focus for a moment. That need… so varied, so different from person to person. I need to focus, but am too old now for my mother to tell me to do my homework or my father to make me finish the food on my plate. I need to believe - oh the assonance of it all - that I can take all the reading I do and spew it out onto a new page, my page. Time is ever so fleeting now, life is brief, but ars longa, vita brevis, so I must, must find a reason to keep breathing.

That said, with or without a muse, I’m going to tell you about something in my life that serves as inspiration for me, and maybe the persons involved are kind of like muses. That idea is consoling, if so. Maybe I’m not alone, always a walker with the dead of my mother’s line. I can ‘do’ dead as a writing topic, but after awhile, the dead run out of steam and collapse. Nothing but a tuft of gauze remains. 

The people I’m thinking of certainly are characters. We talk almost every week, on Saturday. They really have no idea what I am, though, even if they know I was associated with a college and travel. I can go to the big area in a former mill where they are located and know that I am ninety percent in camouflage, make that masquerade, for greater accuracy. They seem wary of me, or were, for quite awhile. Now they smile, and I smile back. There is only one place in this whole town, maybe in this whole country, where this happens.

The Flea Market 

Yes, the flea market is all I have and all I need to be inspired. 

“Well, well. Hello theyah, Catherine!” (He finally remembers I’m not the Kathleen of the song.)

“Hey.” (I try to use this newer version of ‘hi’, but realize people in the flea market still greet you with ‘hi’. I never was good at social interaction.)

“Got a few new books in.” (By new, he means old, scuffed, grungy, falling apart new. He still doesn’t believe I use them to make journals, because dingy doesn’t seem to encourage a person to write…

“That red leather one is gorgeous. What do want for it?”

“You tell me.”

“Three dollars?” (I feel guilty offering so little. It’s a lovely little volume of English poetry from the early 1900s. Leather cover. Sewn binding, not glued.)

“I was gonna ask for a dollar.”

“I’ll take it.” Then I ask about any new old papers or sheet music and Jim shows me some file folders with enticing material. He knows I can stand and stare at an object without talking because I’m dredging up memories, images of things my mother’s line had made or purchased. He knows because I make snippets of comments. I say, “We had one of those” or “My mother used to serve the meatloaf on a plate just like this one.” Other things I do are to speculate as to the decade when an object was manufactured or where. My accuracy isn’t bad. 

“Thanks, Jim,” I say as I head down an aisle with my now-cool coffee that has only cost me a dollar because one vendor likes to be in charge of everybody getting cheap snacks and drinks. Everybody is the group that is there to sell every Saturday and Sunday. However, I too am welcome to make myself a coffee. Everybody seems to be a certain class, one I know far too well, one I tried to escape from except it still haunts me.

I don’t really need these books, but I will use them and if I make a journal that saves me more fifteen dollars if I buy one in a store. I’m buying conversation, in a way, but it’s one I find comfortable, natural, unlike stilted academics speak. Or religious zealots. Maybe I can make a book using the covers or marbled end papers, remind people that books did, and do, exist. For $2, I can walk off with new thoughts that someone saw fit to publish in the nineteenth century.

I want to run back to Jim to offer him more money, then realize that is a bad idea. My plot says ‘pay’; his says ‘I don’t want your hard-earned cash’.

I have so much more to say about the flea market, but I ought to leave it for another time. There are so many things there, some real junk - but then I see someone buy what I just sneered at. It’s not clear which of us makes the connection first - me or the vendor - but with some it has been faster and easier than with others. I’d like to go into detail - but not to a fault - with each of these people. In fact, I’m going to have to present the rest of what I want to tell you in a list. That way you get the gist of things (and I feel embarrassed about subjecting you to subpar writing again).

1. I wrote - after two years of trying - a story about the flea market and sent it off to a top-level literary journal, arrogant little god of words that I am. Then I had to wait. Three months later, I received a response. Journal X had enthusiastically accepted it and even paid me. It was all I needed. My almost-friends at the Flea Market helped me with their quirks and burdens, their tastes and their tragedies. I don’t need to provide more description than that. Look up what quirks are, what tragedy means and its origins (hint: beware of Greeks). 
2. I was so thrilled. I wanted to thank them.
3. I self-published mini books with the story about how the place and its people inspire me. I tried to disguise the characters, but obviously that was a useless effort. It would be scary if they figured out what I’d done. Here I was, though, trying to write a piece of fiction and I had such good, real, material that I could simply lift it all from them and use it. 
4. I couldn’t do that to them. I had a problem: my muses from the flea market knew too much, had too much to say. There were far ahead of me.

And that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Maybe I need to find a new muse, one that has not abandoned Mount Helicon for Maine and frequents a flea market. Or maybe I should just set up a booth of my own and spin stories for those who wish to listen.

~ Adriana Hull, Author.