Monday 16 October 2000

Pic of the day: Where peaceful waters flow ... Photo from this spring, so far, far away, a time gone forever.

Muses and musings

Despite a rather short night, I was grinning broadly at work. Weekends seem to be good for me. Wouldn't I wish I could have a weekend every day! But you have to put food on yourself. And buy a new computer every other year or so, too. There was a really good offer from Elkjøp today. Well, by Norwegian standards. There was just one downside to it: It was a Toshiba. I have had exactly one Toshiba in my life (I'm writing at it right now) and it's the shoddiest computer I've owned or seen in my life. I'm glad to see that they have adjusted their prices accordingly. But, I think I shall rather wait and see. This one still works, if you save your work often enough.

***

One contribution to my good mode came from my literary muse, who has deigned to visit me again. No, it's no one incarnate. Just the ambient inspiration that sometimes trails along with some of us, whispering sweet little lies in our minds: Stories that we'd like to read if others had written them, or fictional characters who insist on attaining at least a second hand reality.

Perhaps I'm going to put this story too on the Internet. It's not like I'm going to finish it, or anything. (You know what happened to my previous novel attempt, Gwalawala. It petered out, sort of.) Still, I'm writing this story in HTML. Just in case.

If nothing (and no one) else, I enjoy it. And it is reasonably cheap, if I have the spare time. This story seems to be more light-hearted and at the same time more dramatic. More like "light fantasy" and less "high fantasy", at least so far. More like Piers Anthony and less like Stephen Donaldson. And it's incredibly open to include different ideas. In particular, I intend to throw in small pieces of fan fiction; just homage, really. We'll have to see, but it could be fun.

Anyway, it did entertain me on the way to work. Particularly the heated debate about masturbation between the religious zealot and the dim freshman.

***

In days of yore, people actually believed that the muse was some entity outside of the artist himself. And that genius was actually a genie, or djinn as it is also spelled, a spirit that assisted certain people and often followed a certain family down through the ages.

I can certainly understand this idea. Even now, I often feel that my literary attempt are not quite under my own control. Oh, I can regulate them, but not really create them. The characters seem to develop their own personality, and may put a spanner in the works of my plots. A particular detail may expand into a whole sub-story, which comes to me as if told. I do not know it, and then after telling it to myself, I have it. This may happen while writing, or just while thinking of the story. The latter are often the best, but my mind can only hold so much at a time.

Nor is this the only area of life where this has happened, nor even the most intense. Back while I was a youngish programmer, I would often get revelations in programming. There really is no better word for it. I might be walking along the road or doing some mindless task, my thoughts idly wandering - and there into my mind would pop a genial solution. From there, coding it would just be a matter of routine work. For a while, I rarely bothered to think over the problems and the structures of the software I made. I just found out what was needed, and after a few days the solution would come. Simple as that. As if from outside. As if from some kind of programming spirit. Genie? Muse?

Today I believe that these things are complexes: Structures in our psyche that are basically related to a personality, but smaller and less advanced. I've heard that the characters in our dreams are also such complexes. And that sometimes we project them on real people, so that we don't really see the other, but something from our own psyche.

I understand that in the past, some male artists had a female friend who acted as their muse. She was their inspiration, the embodiment of their dreams. And without her, they felt lost, almost dead. A strange thing, is it not? And I guess it did not just happen hundreds of years ago. There's this song that I really like, and strangely it has this too:

Always, she is standing by my side:
She's my inspiration, and she's my battle cry;
and in her arms is the only place I know
where peaceful waters flow.

(Chris de Burgh, Where peaceful waters flow.)

Now, that's obviously not how my mind works. But it sounds sort of cool; perhaps I could use it in a novel ... if my muse is cooperating.