friday's fable: down by the river

Keeping this blog has been an irregular, oddly shaped thing. It's course has wandered and my attention diverted too many times to make apologizing practical or interesting. Sitting down to write, not just this blog, but in general, there's always a tension I have a hard time shaking off. Some people talk about their inner editor, that plaguing force that has you checking semi-colons, when you should really be cranking out five thousand words in two hours.

There's some of that. Mostly, I think of it like stage fright -- a thing I never once felt when I was actually on stage. But my mind goes blank, my words disappear and I'm left with a bright, light screen and access to the internet.

Oh, and I've started to play WoW.

Recently, I applied for a job with an online content mill. Basically, it's a clearing house for freelance writers, which pays roughly minimum wage but you can wear pajamas and work from your laptop, so there's that. I carefully prepared my application, whipped up a writing sample and sent it off, already trying to figure out a work schedule. After all, I'm getting my degree in writing; there was no chance I wouldn't be hired.

The next morning there's a wonderfully polite form letter sitting in my inbox, informing me that no, actually, I was wonderfully qualified but not quite qualified enough.

Back to the blog, I haven't written much since my lovely little rejection letter from the wonderful world of online articles. Playing games and reading other people's writing has been a much more pleasant way of passing the time than wrestling with my own screen fright.

Hercules, Disney

So, there are nine muses in Greek mythology, who preside over specific areas of the arts. They were also the narrating force behind the awful Disney movie that pretended it was based off Greek mythology; I try not to hold it against them, those songs are damn catchy.

They've become best known as figures of inspiration. Stuck for an idea? Pray to the muses. Stuck in the middle of an idea? Uncooperative muses. The word's snuck it's way into semi-common usage, your mileage may vary here, with a ghost of an idea attached. I talk about muses and inspiration as a way of covering for the fact that I can't and won't sit in the damn chair and force myself to work as often as I should. But that's not the muses; that's the author.

The muses as figures in mythology were nine sisters -- and think about that for a minute -- who could and did inspire great poetic heights. Sometimes. When it suited them and you'd damn well better remember to say please and thank you. John Milton invoked Urania, muse of astronomy, in his work Paradise Lost and the historian Herodotus named each of the nine books of his Histories after one of the muses.

The muses taught the Sphinx her riddle.

Calliope was the mother of Orpheus. As the story goes, he was killed by the Maenads, who tore him limb from limb and his head continued to sing as it was carried down river. The muses sang to mourn him and collected his lyre, and in some versions his head, too, for burial. 

On the one hand, these stories are just stories. Maybe that's all they were ever meant to be. On the other hand, there's an idea hovering in the thin weave of a pattern -- inspiration and art and wisdom are all wonderful, beautiful things. They're also painful, destructive and difficult. And sometimes, as Orpheus found out, as good as they are, they aren't enough.

Gustave Moreau