MUSING ABOUT THE MUSE

Part of what I am doing here is creating a "muse"--taking one of the digital Poser/Daz figures and focusing my creative energy on her. I've done this all my life with "real" women, of course. Mostly they were women I knew only slightly, or indeed not at all, just someone I saw in passing—for instance, an elegant lady crossing a street or sitting in a cafe, a woman with a kind of erotic pizzazz, a way of walking, a sense of subterranean sexuality stirring within her. Such a figure seems to provide a kind of open doorway: I enter, and discover my novel. The couple times I tried this with a girlfriend, however, did not work, perhaps because reality tends to intervene. Novels—however rooted they are in the real world—are fantasies. They are creations. If a muse says “No!”—No, I wont wear those shoes, No, I don’t have time for this, or No, I don’t have to cater to your sexual/artistic fantasies—then the doorway she offers slams shut. It is much safer to use a woman with whom I have no contact: I can thus imagine whatever I wish. But as I age, there seems fewer and fewer of these women-muses, and those I do find seem less powerful, less profound: they last for a chapter or two, and then dry up. I’ll write more about this later. But if this dynamic—using real women—has become undependable, why not try to use a truly imaginary woman? Why bother with reality at all?

One of the characters I am using in the movie version of Evidence I call “Enoja,” which is Spanish for “Anger.” She is a rather feral creature. I think of her as a “guide,” a sort of Beatrice to my Dante. I expect to use three or four of these guides, who are characters in the movie, to help me. To emphasize their individuality—to help make them “real” in their particular imaginary way—I am experimenting with their looks, their clothes, their manner. I am also using them in my other work. I’ve recently finished the e-book version of Mofa, for instance, my second novel; and I used Enoja to illustrate it. I also used a variation of her for Orphe, which is also an e-book, and am using still another variation for Orifice, which will be my next publication. This is a kind of exploration of Enoja as Muse. This exploration seems to be working. Ideas, images, possibilities are coalescing around her in my subconscious. I am curious to see where she will lead me.