Bucking the Muse: Introduction

Bucking the Muse: Introduction

I can’t speak for other creatives but I can speak to the problems that face me as a storyteller and artist.  I am a slave to inspiration, to the muses that pull the strings of my creative outlets.  I think that’s how it is for so many of us.  Be your artistry writing, poetry, music, dance or fine art, the muse is the embodiment of that which inspires creation and for so many of us, she walks away when we need her the most.

Greek and Roman tradition would have us see the muse as the source of all creation and knowledge.  The origin and evolution of the muses is pretty interesting stuff if you ever research it.  Here, I’ll refer to “The Muse” as a singular entity that embodies inspiration and the spark of genius that is the writer’s source of power. 

Communing with the daughters of Zeus

There are many ways that the Muse affects us.  She gifts us with creative energy, which is that feeling you get when you MUST create something.  Without a germ or seed of something to plant in this perfect time, for me this creative energy can turn into something painfully disruptive and manic, like an addiction that cannot be salved, an itch in the bone where I cannot scratch.  

Sometimes she gives us the very creative seed that we need.  For me it is something that springs from another idea that catches in my spongy gray matter like a burr in a wool sweater.  It digs in its barbs and refuses to budge and so I must examine it more closely.  And as I look at it, it germinates and produces a shoot or various shoots.  If the Creative Energy is there, one or two shoots take root and then blossom into my brain, instead of without.  

If my mind is clear and my thoughts are flowing the Muse allows me to access a cocktail of knowledge and talent with which to cultivate these blossoms which are the beginning of a story.  The Muse allows me to travel inside my head where I find that the strongest of the blossoms has consumed its weaker brothers and sisters to become a story. Here it is now developing into a new Garden of Eden in which a world is born and its inhabitants are taking their first shaky steps.

The Muse takes me into this world where we fly high above it seeing the lands being born through the cataclysms where thoughts and feeling clash.  She shows me eons in minutes and epochs in seconds.  And so we fly lower to see the flora and fauna.  We find creatures living here and we already understand how their existence will affect the future as time has no meaning, we only order it to better understand and alter it where needed.

We land in a small tribal community to observe primitive people and walk among them as unseen gods.  We affect their lives with the blink of an eye.  By sharing of the air that we breathe we set them above all other inhabitants of this world.  And we step back to see this primitive camp turn into a settlement, a town, a city, a sprawling metropolis.  We look at the things the decedents of those primitive men and women have made as we directed and are thrilled to see that they have somehow even managed to surpass our original ideas.

And then, she takes me to a door, like so many others but I feel that behind this door something important exists and so I knock, hesitantly at first and then throw it open with reckless abandon as my Muse fills me with giddy, childlike excitement and there I find that person.  The one.  The hero or heroin and I fall instantly in love. 

Now the story begins…

This is my Muse and I love her for all that she does for me.  And then she’s gone.  My goddess disappears.  She’s given me all this great responsibility for a world that I created with my own hands and these people that I know and love and then she forsakes me.  I know the story of this world and the great destiny of my hero and suddenly it feels like too much.  Without her I feel the back bending weight of it all which causes my knees to ache and my weariness to overwhelm.

But I’m and artist and I soldier on.  I try despite my weariness.  I find another source of strength and I find a way to keep going without her.  I don’t need her.  She’s abandoned me and I can create my own inspiration!

And then she comes back.  Despite my blustering, in spite of my anger and hurt, I’m so happy to see her, to hold her in my arms and to feel that creative energy again.  And as we embrace, she whispers into my ear, her sultry lips caressing that sensitive flesh.  She says, “I did not come back for this world in which you slave.  I bring you a new gift.  Come with me.”

And this is the idea behind Bucking the Muse.  She is willful and untamable.  She is a force of nature but she can also be a siren, a sultry vixen that tempts and taunts.  We creatives must learn to make her work for us and how to buck her off when she would climb on our backs like a demonic imp pulling us away from our labors of love.

More to come on Bucking the Muse.

Listening to Muse: Uprising  Anyone ever notice that the synthesizer bit in the beginning of this is the Dr. Who theme?