RE: muses

[permetaform]

th_nightengale mentioned muse-independant v. muse-dependant creation of artwork, and wondered about the possible demographics of creators who might or might not work with a muse.

[Poll #480760]
Personally, I work independant of a muse but keep on hearing about them occasionally in that other people use them. musesfool helped me clarify the idea of a muse in that the way I'm addressing them here is specifically as a separate individual entity.

If you do work with a muse, what form do they take and/or look like? Do you know what they look like? Do they change depending on your project?

Also, could this be at all culturally motivated? ie. more of an emphasis from western cultures who have a tradition (from the Greeks) of muses? OR could it be more prominent from cultures who do not like to accept the idea that inspiration/creativitiy/intelligence comes from oneself? (versus a higher being? or an alternate being?)

[edit] This also brings up interesting issues around sources of inspiration, and faith; can/should/could inspiration be attributed to outside sources? Common western psychological thought is that outside voices are simply hallucinations. But other lines of argument argue that creativity is simply a perception of more levels of possibility than those that occur in our current realm of existence...

[interesting threads]
- here (started by karose)
- here (started by sorchafyre)
- here (started by karotsamused)
- here (started by ranalore)
- here (started by aliaswestgate)
- here (started by billradish)
- here (started by th_nightengale)

[interesting followup post]
Muses and Friends - a poll and some discussion about a possible link between muses and the use of imaginary friends

[NOTE] The purpose of this post is to present a friendly forum for discussion. Please keep the discussion friendly and open? Concern is valid, so is criticism; but please keep an open mind. ::hugs flist:: Cool beans?

Comments

Re: possibly the most-out-there muses so far?

[nightengale.livejournal.com]

Jounouchi has been around longest, and I'm best friends with him out of all of them. He showed up as a character originally, and that didn't go so well...^^;;...so he started back-seat driving and hasn't stopped since. He's sorta close to his canon (YGO) in some ways, especially when I put him down in a story, but in other ways he's much more intuitive and less rash. He adores talking to bardicsidhe's Honda muse. Jou's the one most likely to talk to me when I'm depressed or in a very non-writing mood: He'll just let me rail at him. And, he gets affected by my emotions most. When I go emo-child, he's the one who has relationship problems, or gets moody. The easiest way to summarize our relationship is that he plays the role of my big brother, when not writing. When we are writing,

Seto showed up very shortly after Jou, but is much less reliable, and is currently MIA. I know he's not gone, though, in the same way you know a silent person is still in the room with you. He's also rather close to his canon (YGO again) and yet has very significant differences, most of which are represented in his wardrobe. It's much more relaxed and easygoing than his strung-tight sharp trenches from the show. I won't go into too much detail about him here, simply that he's the one who normally helps me most with my original poetry. He also helps when I need to write him as a character, though he prefers introspection to any action. He's been absent for nearly a month now, left after he and Jou had a huge fight (which was conducted within my room/head and which ruined my mental state for the three days that it spanned) and he'll be back eventually, I know it. He's the most levelheaded and "cranky" of my muses, though the cranky is mostly an act.

The next one to show up was Panda. Panda doesn't like its name being capitalized but I will do so here just for convenience's sake. Panda is actually a panda--think Tarepanda, or a more cartoonish version of the World Wildlife Federation panda. It sometimes is small enough that it sits on my lap, and sometimes it goes full-size and lumbers around my room at large, poking things. It's unique in that it doesn't tend to follow me out of my room, but on the rare occasions it has, it goes chibi and pretends to ride in my messenger bag. It's my crack muse, and works exclusively in fandom; right now its fandom of choice is Prince of Tennis. ^^;;; It's really friendly and it loves my friend exwaiz, who traitorously feeds it ideas. My friend kasugai_gummie is scared of my Panda.

Then there was Tel. Well, Tel and Gabriel and Reed and Cory and Brynn all showed up at once. All of those, except Tel, are characters. And the first two in that list are muses.

Tel showed up the same night that I met Gabriel: the situation was, I had to write a long original piece for Creative Writing class and I'm not experienced with long things. I walked into my dorm room and looked up, and there was Tel, perched in a window frame hanging in the middle of my room. This takes some explaining: obviously, it wasn't a solid window frame. It was the same idea as I mentioned before, half-seeing things out of the corners of your eyes, except I was looking straight at him and it. ::shrug:: At any rate, the sun was coming in through my *actual* window and it was lighting him from behind. Like a painting or something. It was at that moment that I decided my "overactive" imagination was entertaining enough to encourage. Tel wears a bastardized pair of red plaid Hot Topic pants, big clunky-cleated black shoes, and a Duo-esque grin. He named himself after the band Telefon Tel Aviv, which is one of my new loves. Tel has got exploding-chrysanthemum blonde hair and was the first of my muses to state, starting from the day I met him, that he was there to support me, not be served by me. (Jou helps me now, too, but when he showed up he was demanding my service as a writer.) Unfortunately, Tel disappeared the same afternoon he arrived.

duuuh

[nightengale.livejournal.com]

Unfinished thought in the section above:

The easiest way to summarize our relationship is that he plays the role of my big brother, when not writing. When we are writing, Jounouchi is an equal ally to me, suggesting solutions and teasing me as we go. It's a very equal-partners type setup. And this seems like a good point to remind y'all that I consider all my muses, Jou especially, as entities separate from myself. Dunno where they came from or how, but as KA Rose and Kintail said, those aren't the important questions. What is important is that they're there, and that we have this relationship established.