R-357 Calliope

 Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you're not going to make an awful lot of work.
― Chuck Close, American Artist

True as God’s revelation from The Mountain. I’ve always known it which is why on days like today, when I have the desire to write something but no slightest inspiration as to what it might be, the only solution is to put my head down and start writing, put in the time, put in the grunt-work. It’s not lack of inspiration that cuts into my output, but simple laziness when I can’t be bothered to do those hours.

Calliope appears as she will, fickle and flighty as all the Muses, teasing me with a story or a paragraph or a sentence. Sometimes only with that single perfect word I need in just that spot.

There is dark literature about this sort of thing, you know. Black enchantments to capture her, chain her in some hidden place, and abuse her in terrible ways; and the ideas will flow. But Muses, as all women — as anyone really, but women especially — do not like being enslaved to the ravages of masters who demolish them for their magic. It always — and I mean always — ends in tears, or madness, or death.

Or all that.

“The Muse’s Revenge” Ilya Milstein, 2019

Calliope knows I know that, knows I’m harmless. So on these days when I can be bothered to sit at this keyboard, she occasionally visits. I live for those visits, but I never for a second think they’re permanent or even frequent or that she’s wholly mine even when she’s here. Mostly, she just flits by to nuzzle my neck for a brief minute, give me a quick kiss and a smile, then away for — weeks, sometimes, or longer. She can be kind of a bitch about it.

Once in a blue-moon-rare while she stays longer, sometimes even the entire night. She frankly wears me out in that blurred torrent, driving me further in an orgasmic haze of adrenaline and no sleep than I believed I was even remotely capable of being driven. And a couple of times in maybe a decade or so, she’s still there the next morning, though never for long once I stir.

A fact I’ll bet you didn’t know: She snores, albeit lightly — and even that shallow breath against me is enough fire for the next little bit. Then she’s gone, the keyboard rattling in a slowing tattoo in her absence as I try to get that last distilled drop onto the page.

And then I drift, yet again, putting in the time. Or not, as the mood moves me. And always, always, always wonder if she’s gone for good this time.