Musings and Confusings #9, Part 1

So, I've brought this up with a good number of you over the past blog-entry-free half year or so. Yes, I'm a lazy ass, I'll admit it, let's move on to the topic at hand.

I have a muse.

And my muse has, for a significant amount of time now, been on the verge of making the jump from metaphorical construct to full blown imaginary friend. I was reading Stephen King's book on writing (aptly entitled "On Writing") a little while ago and he talks about how he personifies his literary voice, his muse, as being male. If I remember correctly, he described his muse as being kind of like Hunter Thompson; shady, locked in the basement, snarling at people who wander by, blasting angry rock music and taking advantage of his supernatural constitution by doing as many lines and smoking as many cigars as possible. (Don't quote me on this. This sounds like how I remember Stephen King's muse, but it might be a romanticized reconstruction too.)

Anyways, reason one I found this interesting was because I realized how strange it was that I couldn't think of my own muse as being anything but female. If the things I put on the page, the scenes that come to my mind, were being put there by a supernatural source, I can't imagine her being anything but a girl. And I'm not sure what it says about me that the personification of my innermost thoughts and feelings is female. I don't feel like a closeted transsexual, so I can put that possibility out of my head, but its hard to shake the suspicion that there's something Freudian going on.

So that's reason one I find it interesting. Reason two, though, is just a little pinch even more interesting.

Its interesting because I have a muse. Yes, I'm still a vehement atheist. If I talk about my muse, I do so figuratively. Still, if she existed, I have a disconcertingly clear picture of what she looks like, what she sounds like, what she acts like, and most importantly, I have a sense of her soul the way you only have with childhood friends or close siblings or long-time lovers. Inspiration to me always feels like its coming from an external source. It's just so spontaneous, so organic and so subconscious of a process that its hard not to think of it as being something sent to me from outside me. So personifying that source comes incredibly naturally in the way myths tend to.

I've already told a lot of you about what she would look like if she existed physically, although I suppose that's just speculation- a lot of people don't look like their souls, and if she were beamed down from the Olympian heavens, there's no guarantee she would either. But still, describing your own soul tends to be a difficult task without the use of visual metaphor, so take my description of her that way. This is what the part of my soul that gives me art looks like.

I've had a couple of moments few and far between where I could think of her as being Indian, but I generally think of her as being white, with unambitiously brown hair- not sure why. It might just be that I think of her as being the sort of person who could easily disappear into a crowd, as someone who looks really unremarkable until you take a closer look. In any case, she's generally white.

She looks young, with a folksy and undecorated sort of loveliness that couldn't really benefit from makeup or a wardrobe, and wears barely-tight jeans and favors thick, modest sweatshirts and hoodies that hint at a respectable figure but reveal almost none of it. Her hands are perpetually in her pockets, as though they were invariably cold regardless of the temperature. She has features that make her seem almost sickly to the casual observer- she's noticeably even if not deathly pale, she shivers easily at the slightest breeze, and she has a willowy physique and sad, wrinkled eyes that nearly give her a perpetual aura of morbidity. To counterbalance it, though, she has an equally present aura of vibrancy and passion, even longing. She looks at everything with an intense curiosity and laughs easily and compassionately at humanity's foibles, taking advantage of her inconspicuousness to be a perpetual voyeur. But somehow her vibrancy and her morbidity don't seem incompatible with each other, and even seem to make perfect sense together. It's as though her curiosity, her longing for life, her lust for the world was so great and insatiable that it starves her no matter how fully she lives.

That's the brief version. I've gone on for a while about her with some friends, describing her in painstaking detail that I often impressed myself with.

The point is that she's always been so present, so palpably real that its really easy to picture her. I can barely remember a time when I didn't have this voice telling me to make things, to create things, to make up worlds and to sculpt beautiful thoughts that I could give to other people wrapped up in tiny tinfoily packages. I've been writing since I was 9, and I've had what you might consider a respectable output since then- I've written at least 400 pages over the course of my life, not counting papers for school- but most of the pages I've written, which I imagine number in the thousands, were written in my head. A big part of the reason most of that didn't meet the page was sheer timidity. Another part was perfectionism, and yet another part was the sheer effort required by the task. But it's always been happening. I can't remember a time when I didn't have these stories, these scenes floating through my head.