Dec. 5: What makes a muse

In Greek mythology there are nine muses, which were deities responsible for giving artists the inspiration they needed for creation. In a way, this is a paradox since mythology is, basically, glorified fiction. That means that the muses had to inspire someone to create them.

Yeah. My brain just exploded.

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So a muse is defined as anything that can spark creativity. Usually it’s a person. Mostly they’re women. That’s what Wikipedia tells me anyway. Wikipedia is right. Men create art so women will be attracted to them, so they need muses. Women don’t create art for the same reason. Mostly they create art because they don’t have any chocolate.

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I am doing note-a-day for December of 2020 so I have exactly 31 muses to help me finish this project. Yesterday’s muse was Ashley. Today’s muse is Crystal. Her title, listed above, is What Makes a Muse? I have Crystal on Facebook and she is constantly posting videos of herself and her fiancĂ© doing healthy things like stretching, working out, jumping over railings, and eating things that are green. They both look happy together so I guess they are each other’s muses.

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Here are the names of the nine Muses of Greek mythology: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomeni, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania, and Calliope. If I had nine kids, I would name them all after the Muses. Then I would become the first person in history to say: “Melpomeni, quite bickering with Ourania and finish your geography homework while I help Terpsichore with her knitting project.”

Here is what the muses inspire:

Clio: History and guitar.

Euterpe: Music, especially the flute.

Thalia: Comedy, geometry, architecture, and agriculture. (This explains why architects are so freakin funny.)

Melpomene: Tragedy, rhetoric speech.

Terpsichore: Dance, harps, and education.

Erato: Love poetry.

Polymnia: Divine music, geometry, and grammar. (She may object to my use of the Oxford comma.)

Ourania: Astronomy.

Calliope: Heroic poems and rhetoric art. Homer asked her to inspire him while he wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey.     

I note that none of the muses are there for magicians, street mimes, or ventriloquists. Maybe that’s because we’re not important. That makes me sad.

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In art, the muses tend to be depicted as hot chicks. They were sired by Zeus, who slept with a young woman named Mnemosyne for nine consecutive nights. Apparently, the gestation period for titans is less than 24 hours.

Anyway, the nine muses were not interested in anything practical (like me when I was a teenager) so Apollo got them interested in the arts. This means that the muses didn’t create the arts. The arts were always there, hovering around in the stratosphere, waiting for someone to introduce them to Earthlings.

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All of this makes my brain bleed a little. It makes me think about math, which is a universal language. Numbers are absolute. They are not relative. But it takes human beings, and some other advanced animals, to understand this. If everyone on the planet were to just disappear, geometry and long division would still exist. Numbers would still exist. It’s just that no one would really notice them.

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Greek mythology also tells the story of Theseus venturing into the labyrinth to slay the minotaur. He knew it would be impossible to find his way out of the labyrinth, so Ariadne gave him a spool of thread that he could unwind as he progressed through that complex Daedalaian maze. I like to think that Ariadne is a muse, holding the thread while she waits for someone to kill a minotaur or finish some monumental work of art.

Sometimes I think that Theseus should just fall on his sword.


 

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