Inspiration / Muses

Something happens when I'm working on a piece of writing. At the beginning it feels real and raw. I follow the drive of that realness until I run out of steam. That often leaves the work unfinished. If I do come to finish it, the ending doesn't feel like the beginning. It feels like it was just slapped on so the rest of it wouldn't collapse under its own weight, like a flimsy bookend placed at the end of a stack of heavy books. That feeling occurs to me most when I return to finish something after a good amount of time has passed.

I think it has something to do with the nature of the truth. The truth is boundless. It's confusing and messy. It goes everywhere and it doesn't fit into tidy little packages. The spirit I find myself in during those first moments of starting a new piece of writing is simultaneously driven by an insight into the truth, just as it strives toward that truth's best expression. In that, I surrender to the will of the muses, that the truth may speak for itself and without regard for my own hopes and expectations.

Sometimes I think that I'll only know when a piece of my writing is really finished when physicists discover the ultimate fate of the universe. Until then, I'll keep stumbling over my various letters and paragraphs, hoping idly all the while that the muses will one day finish the trouble that they started. After all, every piece of art is an attempt to speak the whole universe. When it is begun, it explodes with infinite energy in every direction. Chaos coalesces into various orders of planets, stars and galaxies; these are the themes, motifs, and unifying theses of our various arts.

We are attendants to the divine, made to put our faith in those powers that exceed our understanding. When that comes to creating art, we submit ourselves to the authority of the muses, entrusting they know their purpose even if we do not. Unfortunately the muses aren't very good at finishing things. I mean, they're still not done creating the whole universe. Its final chapter is still far from written, and its fate eludes us still. So, we mere humans must fall back on guesses and theories, poor substitutes indeed for the guiding hand of the divine.

What theories do we have? Perhaps the universe will expand forever, eventually tearing itself apart at the seams. The various stories I have told will just keep pulling further and further away from one another, and the many characters I have dreamed of will run rampant and wild in a thousand different directions, abandoning all hope of a tidy happy ending. Or perhaps everything will run out of energy long before that and we will arrive at the heat death of the universe, wherein nothing matters anymore to anything that ever was. Perhaps the truth will come to rest coldly in its own withered out emptiness, the ending certain only of the futility of its beginning.

I don't know. I think the muses can only do so much to help artists. With the massive project of the universe to manage, they certainly have bigger fish to fry. Maybe it was never for them to inspire our works all the way to completion. Maybe inspiration alone is not sufficient for creating works both beautiful and true. When the hand of the muses is lifted, the grasp of human willpower must press on. Born half from the beating heart of the gods and half from the stubborn and steady hand of humankind, our arts are living demigods with the potential for true heroism, if only we may see them through to their end.

If only we can figure out how.