I always did love Greek mythology, and as a creative writer I find myself especially attracted to the Muses. These nine sisters are daughters of Zeus (who isn’t?) and the Titan goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. Note that the “m” is silent, and the final “e” is pronounced as a separate syllable. Neh-MAH-sih-ne. Knowing the rules for Greek pronunciation makes the names lyrical as opposed to clumpy and ridiculous. I would not want to insult the Titaness by calling her Knee-moh-SINE.

Anyway, Mnemosyne and Zeus produced these nine daughters after a nine-night pajama party that Big Z’s wife somehow hadn’t got wind of. The girls’ names and brief job descriptions are as follows: Clio (history), Erato (lyric poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), Terpsichore (dance and chorus), Thalia (comedy and idyllic poetry), Urania (astronomy) and Calliope (epic poetry, music, song, dance, and eloquence). Calliope, being the oldest, apparently wound up with the most responsibility, taking a quasi-supervisory role over some of her sisters. I also notice that these folks leaned heavy on the poetry, and that there is no mention of a Muse for the short personal essay. Did prose not get invented until later?

But I digress. Not to be deterred, I hereby invite Calliope to be my primary Muse, in hopes that our association will lead to ever more eloquence on my part. I’d also like to ask Thalia to pitch in, because I like it when my essays are funny. Apparently, one pronounces these two names “Cah-LIE-oh-pe,” and “THAY-lih-uh.” I do want to keep these ladies happy by not butchering their names.

Do the Muses exist? Well, of course not. Nine immortal women who live outside of our time and space, and who telepathically send us their creative ideas when and if they feel like it, rendering us no more than lowly scribes, and supplicant scribes at that? Nah. And yet. . .there are those times when the ideas just seem to spring fully formed onto my keyboard, and those other times when having an idea in the intellectual sense does me no good at all, and I move hastily to erase the garbage I just wrote before I start thinking it is maybe good enough. Of course, I can easily write this phenomenon off as a shifting of my moods, a dip or surge in my relative mental health, or how hard I am trying or not trying to be clever at any given time.

I guess the bottom line is that the state of mind to write something worthy of the ink (or bytes) is a transient thing, that gets all the slipperier when someone tries to quantify it and tie it down. And I do like thinking of the lovely Calliope and her sister Thalia, something like cats, who have my back but will demonstrate their loyalty when and only when they think the time is right. Of course, they are a part of me—of all of us—but I like to think that they are also, in some way, transcendent of us mere mortals.

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For your further edification:

The 9 Greek Muses and Their Unique Attributes (thoughtco.com)