The Muses

The Muses - who are they? What are they? And how do they relate to me?

The traditional - or at least Classical - understanding is that there are nine Muses who embody the arts and inspire creativity through such diverse forms as music, writing, acting and dance. (However, according to the Roman scholar Varro, there are (or at least were) three muses: Melete or Practice, born from the movement of water; Mneme or Memory, who makes a sound when striking the air; and Aoide or Song, who is embodied only in the human voice). They are sometimes referred to as water nymphs,

"associated with the springs of Helicon and with Pieris. It was said that the winged horse Pegasus touched his hooves to the ground on Helicon, causing four sacred springs to burst forth, from which the muses were born. Athena later tamed the horse and presented him to the muses." (Source: Wikipedia)

However, other stories conflict with this one vis-a-vis their genesis and parentage, including Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory) and Uranus (god of the Sky) and Gaia (goddess of the Earth), Zeus' grandparents.

The nine Muses are:

- Calliope, muse of epic poetry, whose emblem is the writing tablet;

- Clio, muse of history, whose emblem is scrolls;

- Erato, muse of love poetry, whose emblem is a lyre-like instrument called a cithara;

- Euterpe, muse of song and elegiac poetry, whose emblem is a flute-like instrument called an aulos;

- Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, whose emblem is the tragic mask;

- Polyhymnia, the muse of hymns, whose emblem is the veil;

- Terpsichore, the muse of dance, whose emblem is the lyre;

- Thalia, the muse of comedy, whose emblem is the comic mask;

- Urania, the muse of astronomy, whose emblem is the globe and compass.

The muses more or less covered all facets of the Arts, and were also associated with all forms of learning.

Now which Muses would influence me? Truth be told a lot of my poetic and literary endeavours have been inspired by women, particularly ones I've been in love/infatuated with. I think it's safe to assume that I'm not the only one. It is no accident that the Muses have traditionally been portrayed as beautiful women, and indeed that's how I imagine them, though no doubt for some they would alternatively assume a more masculine manifestation. Being an aspiring novelist, casual poet, history buff and at times having been something of the class clown, I guess the Muses that would impact me or have done so would be Calliope (assuming that "epic poetry" includes novels/novellas, etc), Clio, Erato and even Thalia (though this last one might be the subject of some debate).

May the Muses never turn their faces from me.

My Personal Poetic

My own particular Poetic: what is it? It is only in the last few months that I have even considered this question. And it’s not worth bothering with Wikipedia – it told me nothing! If I have understood correctly my personal Poetic is my literary or artistic voice, and perhaps touches on influences, experiences and what inspires me or has inspired me to write or create. In order to answer this question I shall touch on these and other factors, and hopefully provide a clear picture of my own literary microcosm, a coherent idea of the literary and artistic macrocosm and perhaps even how the two relate.

First of all, where does my creativity come from? I guess it comes from my soul; whether inspiration comes from God is hard to say – some of the ideas I’ve had it would be blasphemy to attribute to the Almighty, though He does have an uncanny knack of turning negatives into positives and He does move in mysterious ways. And as you probably deduced from my last comments, my soul is informed by religious beliefs of a discernibly Christian nature, and yet I would be lying if I said sex held no fascination for me either – I realise it makes for an interesting contrast! All my life I have been fascinated by both the sacred and the profane, but never the twain should meet. Of course, these don’t always feature in my work, at least as far as I’m aware, though no doubt a moralistic viewpoint would possibly be discernable, plus my fixation on the theme of redemption, and perhaps explorations of what it is to be a man. I am not sure I could write a purely dark piece, or a totally dark piece – I guess I am too fixated on heading for the light, and that would inevitably shine through. However, I have also written a few pieces light-hearted and comical in nature, if a little quirky. I guess this is indicative of my generally happy-go-lucky disposition.

I guess as first adolescence and then adulthood took over I may have inadvertently picked up an existentialist thread in my poetic. I was a straight white Christian male growing up in a middle-class household in a rural/regional conservative heartland, so what oppression could I have possibly faced? The answer: being a straight white Christian male growing up in a middle-class household in a rural/regional conservative heartland in the ‘90s! Certain elements of society seemed determined to make me feel guilty for being a straight white male, at least from where I was standing, and straight white male bashing seemed to be the sport du jour among the left-wing elite. Furthermore I just couldn’t get into the popular music of the day, be it the depressing, joyless proto-emo dirges of The Smashing Pumpkins and their ilk or the egotistical and at times sociopathic and misogynistic posturing of rap or the soulless electronic noise of techno or a lot of the bubblegum that was on the charts, and as I’ve gotten older television and pop music has gotten worse – vacuousness, cheapened sexuality and prime-time pornography, self-absorption, materialism and commercialism and all too often a moral compass that is either skew-whiff or non-existent. I found myself drawn to country music, jazz, and classic rock from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Because of my love of the classics and lukewarm to cold response to a lot of the newer material some of my peers harboured the attitude that I was a walking anachronism, born out of my era. “Do you listen to any modern music?” they would ask, to which I reply that I do, just not the teenybopper stuff. Then more recently I was stuck in a job I hated which drained me physically and mentally, which gave me no joy or stimulation, until enrolling in this course and finally breaking free of that treadmill. I now watch little television and listen to no commercial radio, choosing not to let advertising, abysmal pop music and general stupidity be shoved down my throat. More importantly, I feel I have broken free of the “Other” and am taking charge of my life.

However, somewhere between childhood and adulthood I swung from being a budding Romantic to more of a Realist persuasion; could I be currently swinging somewhere between the two? As a youth, just as the Romantics of old idealised medieval Europe I found myself drawn to mid-20th century America, and also Britain and Australia, taking perhaps a Romantic view of it, though I can’t help but notice a palaeo-conservative element to Romanticism – both schools of thought idealise the past, or at least perceive the past as better than the present. Indeed they seemed to be well-reconciled in me. Even in Realist mode, the attraction to that time and place still remains, perhaps not least because it gave us classic hard-boiled crime novels and film noir and the early music of artists like Johnny Cash – tales of the downtrodden and disenfranchised, of desperate losers and cynical heroes and anti-heroes often on the wrong side of the tracks.

Writers – be they novelists, poets and even songwriters/musicians – who have influenced me have included Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, James Ellroy, Frank Miller, John O’Grady (a.k.a. Nino Culotta), T.S. Eliot, John Lennon, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. For some reason I’ve often felt like I subconsciously emulate O’Grady, though I like to think my literary voice is my own.

My motivation for writing stemmed from a love of stories, be they in books, movies or songs, or whatever, together with a fertile imagination and a desire to create stories of my own. That plus at least while going through life at the time I found my everyday life as a white middle-class country kid bit nondescript at times, a bit mundane, so it provided a little escape too, a little magic. Plus there have simply been times where it’s in me and it’s got to come out. And indeed it has always been cathartic. With each story or poem I wrote, with each book I read and each class I took my technique got better. I also broadened and developed my vocabulary to lend richness and diversity to the language used, to have the right words to convey the message or paint the mental picture and it also comes in handy for poetry and alliteration, a literary device I am particularly partial to and welcome every opportunity to employ.

My poetry has tended to be free verse, sometimes almost prosaic. This is partly through laziness, as it can be hard to come up with a rhyme that doesn’t sound trite or corny, and I lack the ability to compose music so what need have I for the iambic pentameter?

My actual purpose for writing, well, again I like stories, though I’d like to think there’s at least some depth to what I write too, that they edify or at least entertain. Naturally I would like it to be read by others, I would like it to reach others and enrich them somehow – if I just wrote and didn’t do anything with what I had written it would amount to nothing more than artistic masturbation.

But then I suppose that’s been the case with many a writer or artist across the ages – they’re creating this possibly great work, something beautiful, so why not share it? And if they can do it professionally, even better. But what is the role in society of the writer, or indeed the artist or musician? Is it to make a social comment, to hold a mirror up to society? Is it to make a political statement? Is it to fight oppression, or alternatively to reinforce it? Does it create social change, or merely chronicle it? Is it to praise or commune with God, or thumb one’s nose at Him or disregard Him altogether? Is it to make an artistic statement? Is it to make a statement of any kind, or is it merely to entertain? In the case of writing, is it simply to record and provide information? Is it to escape one’s milieu, or confront it head on? Depending on the individual work any one of these answers is correct, and sometimes there is more than one correct answer.

I would like to think the average reader could be anyone, that I could have a broad and diverse readership. I seek to entertain and hopefully edify too, to hopefully make the reader think, to uplift the reader and perhaps even provide a moral compass. One faculty I’ve always wanted to engage in the audience is their imagination, to take the pictures in my head and put them in the heads of my audience.