February must be camellia month in Sacramento. There may be other camellia months here, but February is the one I have been witness to and thus the most special to me. I have always loved camellias. Loved them for their sweet, ruffly bursts of voluptuous color. Opal and crimson and blush and so large and moonish and perfect that they make you wonder why roses get all the credit when they exist in a world with camellias. Loved them for their round marble buds with just the faintest tips of petal showing at the edges, hinting at what they might be, surrounded by soft coats of gentle spring green. Loved them for the two in particular who stood gracefully by the front door at our Birchwood home and for the way they look, bobbing charmingly in shallow bowls of water. And so, I thought, I loved the camellias as much as a person could love them. And then I met February in Sacramento. Here, in February, the camellias are in bloom on nearly every front lawn and in hedges along the side walls of apartment buildings. They are covered, covered in blooms, their strong branches hanging heavy with flowers and scattered about in the grass are the fallen petals of flowers left long and glorious on the limb. Camellia trees resound. If you have ever loved a camellia, you should see them when they are trees. Not cropped into unhappy square hedges of awkward heights, camellia trees are resplendent in their low, exuberant grandeur. Until the camellia trees, I had thought of my drive through the grapevine this trip with a small hint of sadness that I had come too early yet to see the lupines scattered among the poppies on the mountains. But if I had made it for the lupines, I may have missed the February camellias and so I know that the timing was right after all.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about muses. It may seem like muses have nothing to do with camellia trees or camellias with muses, but for me, they most definitely do. Writer’s block, the opposite of the muse, I don’t believe in. I suspect that any person staring at a blank page covered endlessly in empty blue lines, or an empty computer screen with a lethargically blinking cursor, must necessarily find her stream of thoughts and words strained in the face of all that expectant potential. But that’s not writer’s block, that’s just distraction. Like how sometimes at night when the silence is so complete in the darkness that it pounds in your ears and you can’t fall asleep, so tense are you, listening attentively for any faint sound of proof that you haven’t gone deaf and that the world is still breathing around you. And I know some people have a fear of putting words down on paper if they are not polished and complete and wise. Indeed, I ken that fear well. But that is not writer’s block either; that is a nervousness to commit and an insecurity over the relevance of our own intelligence. I don’t believe in writer’s block because there really is no actual block. Not even in our frightened, unintelligent, inarticulate brains. Just the whole world going around and around and waiting for us to write it. Besides, I have a cure (yes, I realize that I can’t believe in a cure if I don’t believe in the problem. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”). But I have a cure, nevertheless. The cure for writer’s block is a word. What word, you ask? Any word. The first one that comes to mind. The last one that comes to mind. Whichever one you put down on the paper. It doesn’t even have to be a real word. It could be something like scklerge. The cure for writer’s block is scklerge. That’s it. Just write scklerge down on your paper, or type it down on your computer, and voilà, writer’s block is banished. It never existed. If you find scklerge less than inspiring, follow it up with another, better word. Something like clarf or ricochet or malarkey. Malarkey is particularly fitting in meaning as well as pronunciation. So maybe when I say I don’t believe in writer’s block, what I really mean is that I don’t waste my time with it.
But muses I will waste my time with. Muses, I believe in. (In the spirit of: if not the con, the pro; if not the yang, the yin), I don’t believe in a something that keeps me from writing, but I believe in a something that facilitates it. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it is an obstinate hope that even when I’m feeling my most droll and un-unique, there is something that can raise me up before I lose myself entirely. Something that reminds me of the beauty and rapture in the world around me, that reminds me of God and grace and love and freedom and nostalgia and heartache and tragedy and sadness, and long, lingering, humid summer twilights, and fireflies.
The original muses lived on Helicon and Parnassus, mostly, when they weren’t rendezvousing with the gods on Olympus, and there were three or nine of them, depending on whom you ask. Actually, it’s silly to say they were the original muses because I suspect that as long as mankind has existed, so has the muse. Certainly Adam and Eve found something to inspire them: the God who created them, the great blue sky, the bounty in the garden in which they lived, even perhaps, in the whisperings of a beguiling serpent. So I don’t think the muses of classical Greece were really the originals, but certainly they are the most famous.
If those geniuses of yore ever graced us modern-folk with their presence, I would hope most for a visit from Polyhymnia, of the nine younger muses. Polyhymnia is the singer of songs to the gods, and though I am far from presuming that I may follow in her shoes, I think that she embodies what I aspire to in life and in art: a grateful recognition of all that has been offered me by the Powers That Be and a rejoicing through the way I live and work. Also, Melete, (of the three older muses) the muse of practice. For me, that is precisely what my writing is born of. I lack the natural gift that would enable me to sit down and weave the truths of light and darkness into an impeccable story in a day or a heartbeat. If I wait a month before I write again, I am as rusty as an old garden latch, the strings of my story partly unraveled, loosened, and all but lost from my grasp and it takes time for me to find them again and put them back together. For me, practice makes up for the natural talent that I lack, and if it weren’t for the ragtag pages of my journal, I would hardly be able to call myself a writer at all. If Melete deigned to visit me here in the 21st century, she would doubtless come through the pages of my journal. Melete is also reported to be born from the movement of water. And certainly, my greatest lone inspirations have come to me out of the crashing waves, when I have sat, my toes buried in sand, watching the sea gulls and the vast freedom of the sky mingling into the ocean on the shores of my hometown. After all, if Melete was ever to come to me, it would probably be there, up out of the sea at Seal Beach, and indeed, maybe she has.
Mona Lisa was also a muse, from what I hear, and her great tragedy is that she sits now in a museum behind a glass wall and a velvet rope where people can admire her only half-heartedly from a distance without ever getting close enough to feel all that she once inspired. And what about Poe’s raven? Creepy, to be sure, but if anyone were to have or create a creepy muse it would be Poe. Keats’ Fanny Brawne, though he seems a bit melodramatic (but whose to judge one man’s muse from another?) Shakespeare appealed to the muses so frequently that they may almost have become tired of hearing him call, but apparently not tired enough to forsake him entirely.
How many times a day does a person need a muse? I suppose it depends on the person. Maybe the muse comes naturally to some people. So much so that they no longer notice its whispering in their ears and only think that that is the way life is, perpetually inspiring. And then maybe there are those who are so unfamiliar with the muse that they don’t even miss it, and inspiration to them is only an unreality, something that other people talk about, that doesn’t touch them. But I suspect most of us are somewhere in the middle and we find our muses here and there, along the roadsides and scrappy byways of our lives. Sometimes they are people, sometimes mystical, sometimes neither. Sometimes they are great and poignant, like the muse we find in a brilliant sunset. Sometimes we must recognize them where they lie, neglected and murky in the gutter somewhere, and we pick them up and wipe them off, tenderly, because we suspect they are more than what they appear to be. Sometimes they are not; sometimes they are merely pieces of sewage-y tumbleweed. But sometimes they are a muse disguised, the lyric in a song that hits us with shocking fierceness, uplifting and motivating in all its honest simplicity; or the color white, splashed unmarred on a large surface, that makes us think of vibrant brush strokes and potential and reminds us of the great, blinding gift of sight. I once had a muse in the shape of a small grey mouse who ran across my path for a fleeting moment and then disappeared forever from my sight...but not from my vision. I have found more muses in raw wood than I can probably count. And also a hundred million muses that dwell in fire. And there is a special kind of muse I find only in the smell of old book pages, and another in the new ones. I don’t think you have to be a parent to have found a muse in a child’s laughter. And there is a muse, for me, in a February camellia tree.
I don’t take any kind of Calvinistic view of the muses. I don’t think they are divinely sent to a chosen few who, effort or no effort, are graced with their presence and all the diversity of wealth it invokes. No, to me, a visit from a muse is as hard of work as the art she inspires. Muses do not come to those who sit lazy and self-satisfied on the sidelines of life, waiting for the desert to which they believe they are entitled. In fact, it seems to me, that muses must find entitlement nearly as abhorrent as apathy. A muse will not come to you for nothing. You must find her. Wherever she is, on any given day, at any given moment. Through listening or guidance or a long-overdue adventure. Through curiosity. And it seems to me that it is worth it to try forever and ever, whether you mostly strike out or your hard work is oft rewarded, to find inspiration in things that are yours to see and hear and feel and think. Muses come to those who seek, and sometimes you find them in wayside places and unexpected forms, waiting for you to notice. And you know they are there because of the gentle but indelible way they grace your life, and everything, at least for a moment like the beat of a hummingbird’s wing, changes.
-R.E.A.
