I
is for Inspiration
It’s
spring, the equinox has passed, and now the days are getting longer.
I sacrificed a bar of chocolate upon the altar of Persephone to
welcome the rebirth of a new year. Actually, I’ve been knee-deep in
edits, on the phone with my incredible editor every day, debating on
where to put commas (actually there is no debate, she says “put”
and I put); finding typos (if she says “put” and I putt, I expect
my readers will be confused); untangling complicated sentences (no
one wants to spend five minutes figuring out who is saying what about
what); and generally smoothing out the books in the series. Let us
sacrifice another bar of chocolate to the nine muses, who help us in
our artistic creations. In ancient days, the muses were invoked by
the artist to help him. For example:
Homer
in The
Iliad
begins many of his stanzas by invoking the muses to help him tell the
tale: ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια
δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι, (Tell me now, Muses who have homes on
Olympus, …)
The
first lines of The
Iliad
invokes the muses: “Sing, O goddess, the destructive wrath of
Achilles, son of Peleus, which brought countless woes upon the
Greeks, and hurled many valiant souls of heroes down to Hades…”
And
in The
Odyssey,
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man
skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on
end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.”
We
say we’ve “lost our muse” when we can’t create, we muse, are
amused, bemused, and we go to museums. Museum is from Greek mouseion
“place of study, library”, originally “a seat or shrine of the
Muses,” from Mousa
“Muse”.
No comments:
Post a Comment