An Exaltation of Muse Ch. 02

An Exaltation of Muse Ch. 02

N.B. This may not make much sense to you, but if you haven't read Ch. 01 it will make no sense whatsoever.

Thalia is mentor to the frustrated muses assigned to writers who don't publish stories but comment freely—and frequently harshly—on other writers' stories. She has dubbed this unlucky lot Muses to the Overt Commentariat (MOCs); they meet each Wednesday in their local, The Fleeting Muse. A week ago she told them that she would try to help them inspire their writers to write and publish stories of their own, hence her return visit. She is doing this, she claims, as atonement for her bitchy behaviour last week, particularly her nasty putdown of the muse named Clio.

It would be churlish of me to neglect giving heartfelt thanks to my beta readers. You know who you are, but I'll keep your names in the silence of my heart to shield you against the slings and arrows of outrageous myrmidons.

Previously, on An Exaltation of Muse:

Thalia shook the last drops of Navy Strength from her glass, set it down on the table, and tapped it with her gold Cross pen. "Social time is over, it's time to start upping our game." She put her briefcase on the table, snapped open the clamshell top, and took out several stapled packets of paper. "Take one and pass the rest around, it's show-and-tell time."

"YOU PROBABLY HAVEN'T read the commentary of many writers other than your own, so I've taken the liberty of gathering some of the pithier examples..." Thalia smirked. "Yeth, pithier." She waited a beat for giggles that never materialized, then grimaced. Looking down at her script, she made to read but only squinted. With a muttered oath, she dug out a pair of reading glasses, then slashed through a line and continued in a less boardroom-like manner.

"Clio, I don't mean to pick on you—"

"But you're going to anyway, right, Thalia?" Clio softened her interruption with a smile.

"Well, I did turn up a few interesting titbits about your hirsute commentator. It seems that he trusts his ear more than his grammar lessons, because he pretty consistently confuses of with have, as in would of, could of, should of, and the like. He should have learnt better in primary school.

"And he really takes the ribbon for nasty comments. It's hard to beat 'This particular author is a fucking idiot', or a comment that begins with 'jesus folks does this story look like another god dam train wreck or what?' and closes with 'jesus h christ what a train wreck.'

Sometimes he gets so angry that you can almost see him sputtering, spitting on the keyboard, and making typos: 'REVLOTING CRAP, AUTHOR. FUCK YOU TOO and i hope you get cancer and die!' Other times this leads him into ethnic slurs, such as 'gotta wonder if this sort of mindless stupidity and gullibility must be a British thing' or 'Please... for the Love of GOD can someone in the UK Please act like man???'

"And his notion of a compliment leaves a lot to be desired—'eh...doesnt suck.' I'll give him this, though: if he likes a story he doesn't shilly-shally about it. You don't have to guess how he feels when his comment begins 'Top 5 best LW story EVER.' and ends with "Goddam fucking fabulous story." Thalia shook her head ruefully.

"He doesn't limit his outbursts to authors or their characters, either, he blasts other commentators, too. 'Folks, have you ever read comments from anyone with a more fucked up grasp of reality??' That's just the beginning of a 523-word diatribe. Sometimes insulting just one commentator doesn't satisfy him: 'What fucking planet are you idiots living on?'

"That invites payback, of course, and sometimes he gets it, in spades. Take this person's response: 'If you weren't so bloody rude all the time, then I might take some notice of what you say. Some of it does make sense, but you get so excited that it tends to come out as gobbledygook. Calm down a bit.'

"So you've got your work cut out for you, Clio, if you ever hope he'll clean up his act. He has a good vocabulary, writes well—except for that of-have confusion—and actually has offered some fair suggestions about how a story could be improved. I think he's a frustrated writer who's afraid to submit something under his own name because of all the rubbish he's talked, so I repeat the suggestion I made last week: he should create an alternate persona—a nom de plume de plume, if you will—and publish a story."

She started to look down at her script again, then turned back at Clio and spoke more softly. "Try, Clio; you're actually quite a good muse." She shifted back to boardroom mode.

"But before we get into dreary lessons—"

She was interrupted by an imperious brunette sitting next to Clio. "Just who are you to be giving us lessons? We're all muses, we're all daughters of Zeus. Some of us may have different mothers, but we're at least half-sisters. I don't remember us ever electing you."

Thalia heaved a sigh so deep it threatened to deflate her not-inconsiderable breastworks. "O Philomela, never ask a question whose answer you won't like. Before I put paid to some of the rubbish that's out there, though, I assure you that I'm sympathetic to your challenge. Like Clio, you're trying to inspire a prolific, prolix commentator who writes no stories of his own. Yours, though, isn't so rude as he is arrogant; he fancies himself a brilliant critic who just knows that everyone eagerly awaits his learned discourses.

"Apparently you've been dipping your souvlaki in lysergic acid or something equally sour, because occasionally his comments are anything but sweet. He may not slam writers or other commentators much, but even when he's delivering one of his interminably profound commentaries, he seems leery of appearing to be pleasant, even dogged in his determination to lord his imagined superior literary acumen over everyone. Maybe he needs to tune out for a while, you know, take a relaxing trip."

Philomela's face flushed with anger, but Thalia ignored it. "Getting on to your question, Philomela, I was appointed, not elected, and no, we may all be muses but we aren't all 'at least half-sisters'. Aeschylus didn't know everything, and don't even get me started on Sir James George Bloody Frazer." She paused to decide where to begin.

"Probably the most blatant bit of utter tosh is the claim that there are only 9 muses—well, 10 if you include Sappho, as Plato would have it. Think how many writers, painters, sculptors, singers, composers, dancers, and the like there must be in the world. Even eliminating the pretenders, there's still got to be hundreds of thousands. How could a mere handful of muses properly inspire them all?"

She was dismayed to see many losing interest, so decided a bit of audience participation was in order. "How many of you are ready to take on one more writer? Hands, please." Three or four raised their arms. "Ah, Hermione, of course, and a few other eager beavers. Or have you all shaved it off?" As scripted, she snickered and again paused expectantly, but once again no one joined her. She angrily struck out another line on the top sheet of her script, then tore it off, screwed it up, and threw it into her briefcase. After several deep breaths, she pasted on a sweet smile.

"Well then, how many are ready to add a dozen? A hundred? A thousand?" She looked about. "No hands? I'm not surprised. Now try to imagine how many artists each muse would be responsible for if 9 or 10 of you had to serve the whole bloody lot. Daddy Zeus might be a randy old goat, but he can't be shagging every minute around the clock. He needs time to fling some thunderbolts, and once in a while he has to just skive off." She abruptly stopped and slapped her hands to her temples.

"Bloody hell, why am I nattering on? You don't give a toss about all that! Here's the short version: The Council of Immortal Authorities anticipated this shortage and resorted to a bit of jiggery-pokery. They recruited hundreds of sweet young things from the hereditary nubility to be pseudo-succubi; their duty was to seduce and collect massive amounts of sperm from lesser gods." Thalia was pleased that she seemed to have renewed their interest.

Before she could continue, however, Philomela interrupted again. "Oh come now, how could that much sperm be collected from...you know, from where it was... umm... deposited?" Philomela smirked, and Thalia made no attempt to hide her irritation. Running out of patience, she slowly turned to face Philomela.

"With several thousand turkey basters, of course. They withdraw as well as they deposit, you know. Instead of trying to irritate me, dear Philomela, you'd do well to pay more attention to the object of your a-musing duties, who seems convinced he's the gods' gift to writers." She paused a beat, then flashed an obviously insincere smile. "Surely he didn't get that arrogance from you, hmmm?" The smile faded.

"Your mother's name may have been Zeuxippe, and she may have been married to the king of Athens, but she had no carnal knowledge of Zeus, and your royal birth didn't make you a muse. Let me explain how it works."

She turned back to face the group. "Each time a hogshead of sperm was gathered from the lesser gods, a thimbleful of sperm from Zeus himself was added." She waved down Philomela before she could interrupt with a question. "Never mind how it was collected. What matters is, this produced a highly adulterated, but still enchanted form of Zeus Juice." She plowed on, even though the now-screwed-up script page called for yet a third pause.

"A network of museums devoted to the womanly arts was established throughout the empire, which attracted thousands upon thousands of fertile females—" She gestured to Philomela, "your mother among them. It proved to be a simple matter to entertain them with music and ply them with wine dosed with a sleeping draught.

"Whilst the women were lost in their dreams, they were artificially inseminated with the enchanted spend—yes, using those selfsame turkey basters. When they came to their senses, they were told that Zeus himself had visited them, and in nine months, give or take, they would give birth to a muse. Soon, the number of muses was keeping up with the number of artists.

"The enchantment was sufficient to turn their wombs into musette bags—" Several giggles and titters ensued even though she again ignored a scripted pause. "But it had no effect on DNA because the dilution was so great. In other words, we may not be half-sisters in the flesh—" She took a deep breath, stood a bit straighter, spoke a bit more firmly, "but we are all sisters in the quest for beauty and strength in the arts."

Thalia collapsed onto her chair. As the others murmured their appreciation, she took comfort that she had fulfilled her duty as muse to the muses; a tipsy few even shed a tear or two. After a pregnant silence, one of the younger muses stifled her sniffles. "Thalia, how can you say you were a pathetic muse when it's so obvious that you're wonderful at it?"

Thalia grimaced at what she considered unwarranted praise. "Yegods and little fishes, girl, I'm quite the opposite of wonderful. Remember how badly I treated Clio Wednesday last, not to mention all the other nasties I've pulled?" After hesitating, she decided it was time to come clean.

"It's time you learnt what your Thalia's really about. Let me confess why I was sent to Loving Wives, which definitely is not considered a prime venue for muses. Not to put too fine a point to it, I deserved it. I was the classic loving wife, the archetype." She took another paper from her briefcase, pushed up her reading glasses, and glanced at it to organize her thoughts.

"Before I was called to be a muse, I was married to Aegisthus, whom I came to love dearly. But I discovered that the marriage was a sham, orchestrated by Agamemnon to divert attention from the fact that Aegisthus was shagging his wife Clitemnestra quite regularly—" For the second week in a row Thalia was interrupted by Urania, who again was eavesdropping from an adjacent table.

"You meant Clytemnestra, of course, Thalia. There's no such—" Thalia's icy stare would have frozen the river Styx.

"The last time I didn't mean what I said, dear Urania, was when my lover asked me what was wrong and I answered 'Nothing.' He believed me, more's the pity, but kept after me until I finally had to admit that yes, there was something wrong, and no, it wasn't anything he did, and I absolutely did not want him to fix it. I just wanted him to let me talk about it.

"As all you ladies know, it isn't easy to admit those things, so now I always say exactly what I mean; wild horses couldn't drag even a white lie from me, luv. And I will always call the bitch Clitemnestra." Thalia turned back to the table. "Now, where were we...oh yes, my so-called marriage to Aegisthus, the smokescreen to cover Aegisthus hiding his banger in Clitemnestra's mash."

Anyone paying close attention might have noticed a flicker of sadness pass over Thalia's face, putting the lie to her seemingly light-hearted talk. "So how did I soothe my sorrowful soul at this betrayal? Why, I seduced someone else to get even, of course. Not just anyone, but Apollo. He didn't stand a chance. He might be a godawful important deity, but he's still male—a penis with arms and legs and a hind brain.

"Among Apollo's many godly responsibilities was taking special care of all muses, not just me. But he began neglecting you; remember when he stopped leading us in song and dance at the Bacchanalias? He was still paying a lot of attention to me, though—paying very well, I might add." She caught herself just as she started to shiver at the memory.

"The rest of you didn't find this amusing, of course, and fell into a funk. Daddy Zeus took a very dim view of our carrying on, and started pitching lightning bolts at Apollo. The first 10 missed because he was so angry, but the 11th exploded so close that Apollo was blown sky high and wound up landing on the moon." In response to a couple of not-so-subtle hisses, she made an innocent "who me" face.

"Then things went to Hades for Aegisthus. Not satisfied with simply cuckolding Agamemnon, Aegisthus and Clitemnestra killed him when he came home from the Trojan war. Eight years later, Agamemnon's son Orestes killed Aegisthus, making me a widow, and Zeus banished me to the cesspool known as Loving Wives. I'm still trying to find the comedy in that."

"AND THAT, DEAR—" Her mobile played a few bars of Vera Lynn's The White Cliffs of Dover. She dug it out of her purse and looked at the screen.

"Bloody hell! I've got to take this." She touched the green phone icon and listened for less than a minute, paled, then touched the red phone icon without responding. Putting the mobile and reading glasses back in her purse, she bade them farewell. "Forgive me, ladies, but I must go. I'll see you next week." As she turned and headed for the door, she added "I hope" under her breath.

Just as Thalia set foot on Tribar Mews in front of The Fleeting Muse, she was struck by a lightning bolt and disappeared.

But wait, there's still more...