The Muse's Writer's Block
The world has become gray. Creativity has come to a standstill. I’m not talking about the normal institutional sameness, like yet another Spider-Man movie, but a real crisis in creativity. No new books have been published, all the TV shows are in reruns, and even YouTube is moribund. New videos are made, but they are based on all the same topics and ideas. For the first time in human history, there literally is nothing new under the sun.
I was baffled by what was going on until Clio, my muse, made a visit. She looked tired and was not dressed in her lofty white robe. Instead, she appeared in an oversized T-shirt and baggy gray sweatpants. Her glow was gone and she had a perplexed look on her face.
“Clio, you look a bit down,” I said. “Usually you have an idea that you can’t wait to share with me.”
She didn’t say a word. She sat down at the desk, pulled out a blank piece of paper, and looked out the window while tapping her pencil. I watched her for a while, waiting for inspiration to come to her, but nothing came.
“It’s terrible, Robert, oh so terrible.”
She turned to face me.
“All the muses have writer’s block. All of them. And I came here to…”
She paused.
“To… to…”
She wanted to say something but couldn’t. She then winced and blurted it all out.
“I need you to give me an idea.”
I was shocked! For millennia, the muses have been supplying the inspiration to humanity. Now they want a mortal’s input?
“You mean things got so bad that you are now consulting me, a mere mortal, for your celestial and pristine genius?”
“Yes, Robert. We are so desperate to keep inspiration alive that we are scraping the bottom of the barrel, hitting rock bottom, gambling on the weakest link, suffering fools gladly…”
“Yes, I see,” I interrupted.
“We can’t explain it,” she continued. “All of a sudden, everything we thought of was bad. The more we thought, the less inspiration there was. It has never happened before!”
“It’s really awful,” I commiserated. “I was having a drink with my friends, and all we could repeat were the same old anecdotes. The bookstores’ ‘new’ sections are empty, and everyone is dressing the same at work—and it’s not tasteful.”
“You see what happens when people try to dress themselves?” she said as I nodded. “It’s not pretty. Humanity really, really needs us. If only we could unlock more ideas, think more, consult the stars—anything to get ideas out there. You know, before inspiration reaches humanity, a lot of work goes on in the background. But never like this!”
Clio sighed, adjusting her flowered garland, which was just beginning to wilt.
“So, Robert, I hate to ask again. Any ideas?”
My sad, blank face said it all, which was nothing at all.
Clio’s shoulders bent forward, despondency overwhelming her. She looked like she was going to cry. The pencil she had been tapping slipped from her fingers and rattled across the desk, completely forgotten. In those oversized sweatpants, she suddenly looked small, stripped of her timeless stature of a goddess and reduced to a fragile soul. All those centuries of genius, the joy of imparting inspiration to us quotidian human beings, all this seemed gone forever. She looked blankly into the middle ground as if all she could see was an infinite gray horizon of the banal and mundane.
“Well,” I said, “it is what it is.”
Clio momentarily froze, then leaped from her chair. She turned to me with a joyous smile on her face.
“Robert, I know you could do it. You fixed everything!”
I didn’t know what I did, but apparently it was something good.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Robert, you did it again! That’s the answer!”
“It is?”
“Exactly!”
“I guess it is.”
“Precisely!”
I stopped understanding what I was saying three sentences ago. I paused and looked at her, giving her a visual cue to explain.
“By asking ‘what is,’ we are stripping everything down to its bare bones. Our problem was focusing too much on the ‘Why,’ such as, ‘Why did they cross the Rubicon? Why did they build the pyramids?’ Things don’t happen because someone sits down and cogitates philosophically. No, things just happen. It is because the Rubicon was there; it is because they had the giant blocks of stone. The world is concerned with the here and now, not what-if! Nothing kills creativity like finding motivations for motivations. You just write down what immediately comes to mind and see what happens.”
“So that is it?”
“You can’t stop, can you, Robert!”
“I guess not,” I said, still perplexed.
“Okay, I’m off. Gotta let the other muses know about this!”
Then, she elegantly faded away to her other world, and once more, creativity on planet Earth flourished under the guidance of those wonderful muses. As it turned out, the secret to the muses’ inspiration wasn't hidden in the stars, but in five ordinary words spoken by an ordinary mortal who still doesn’t get what he said.
