When the Muse is Silent

There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. 

Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know (Stephen King, On Writing, p. 145).

I’ve met some exceptional people since starting this blog, and one of them inspired my muse this week. It seems that hers had gone missing, and I could just feel the butterflies of longing, sorrow, and a little fear as I read her blog.

I’m sympathetic. Quite sympathetic, having just come out of a dry place myself. With an irony that can’t be ignored, my Muse re-surfaced with this blog. Who’da thunk she would be out here in the blogosphere, blogging? I thought she might be interested in writing for money, perhaps using the 103-page manuscript I spent two years completing to jumpstart the next book. But, noooooo. She’s hogging my chair, bent over the keyboard and blogging like dogs in heat.

It’s painful when the Muse is silent. In one of my favorite books about writing, On Writing, prolific author Stephen King says, “For me, not working is the real work” (King 153). I’ve noticed that, in my own life, when the Muse is silent, the whole house is silent. That is, the Muse is AWOL and God seems to have gone with her. My spirit and my imagination are silent as a void moon. I also usually do not dream during these times, signifying that my unconscious is in on it, too. The deep well into which I lower the bucket and bring out living waters has gone dry. I can hear the bucket clanking against the bottom of the well. Ghosts rattling chains.

MO-om! She’s staring at me!

My daughter was one of the most socially adept people I have ever met. From the yougest age, she captivated people with her vibrant, bubbly personality. She was always happy, unless she was very ill.

Olivia’s love of people made her watchful and observant. She liked to consider people, studying their faces and their mannerisms–the way they used their hands (or not), the way they held their bodies when they talked, their facial expressions.

The way Olivia stared at people could be unnerving. She most particularly enjoyed staring at me as we sat at the dinner table. By this, I do not mean an occasional gaze that she averted once she realized I had caught her staring at me; I mean the full-out stare of the third eye of Shiva!

As might be expected, this could be quite unnerving.

One night at the dinner table, after a long and draining day, I found I hadn’t my usual tolerance for Olivia’s third-eye stare. I felt an archaic complaint well up inside me: “MO-om! She’s staring at me!”

I slapped my fork down on the dinner table and leaned forward.

“Olivia! Why do you stare at me all the time? What on earth are you thinking? It’s unnerving!”

Silence.

“Olivia! Why are you staring at me?!”

Silence.

Then, with a soft voice absent of guile, Olivia said, “Because you’re so pretty.”