It is my contention that is order to Keep a Muse, you must
first offer food. How can you feed something that isn’t yet there is a little
hard to explain…
The fact is simple enough. Throughout a lifetime by
ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger, and more
substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable. It can be
viewed only as intervals along the way. We know it is happening, but we don’t
quite know, how or why.
Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds,
sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events,
large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and
our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but
reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are
the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the
file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against
memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against
ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary.
What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative
aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. They are two names for one thing. But no
matter what we call it, here is the core of the individual we pretend to extol,
to whom we build shrines and hold lip services in our democratic society. Here
is the stuff of originality. For it is in the totality of experience reckoned
with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in
the world. For no man sees the same events in the same order, in his life. One
man sees death younger than another, one man knows love more quickly than
another. My muse has grown out of a mulch of good, bad and indifferent.
