Introductions to the muse.
Recently, dawn_metcalf decided it was time to introduce people to her muse. Never a bad idea, as far as I'm concerned, because you can tell a lot about a person by their muse. Only then I realized that I'd never actually stopped to introduce the people here to my muse -- I complain about her enough that I tend to assume folks just know who she is. Since I like people to understand why I occasionally stop what I'm doing to shriek "Dammit, Jane!" and threaten empty air, well...
...introductions seem to be in order.
***
People ask me the question, you know. It seems a little bit silly to point that smoking gun at me -- you're supposed to ask serious writers, after all, and I'm not a serious writer; Shakespeare, Poe, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde, those are serious writers. I’m just a blonde girl from somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon, with a head full of stories and feet covered in runic scratches from the blackberry briers at the bottom of the gulch. But they ask me anyway.
Where do you get your ideas?
I have to admit that there's a certain urge to answer with 'from the moon from the sea from the stars from the rose owl -- she brings me gifts, you know, she brings me missives from the lady of the tides, she wraps them in briers and seals them with kisses, from the star wolf, from the train conductor on the Babylon Express, from the calico cat with the tri-corner hat -- she burns like a flame when the sun goes down -- from the goose girl, from the horses of Lir...' I could say that, and no one would argue with me, because no one argues with me when I'm clearly out of my mind. But none of that would be true.
Oh, I know all those people; sometimes, when the candles burn low and the flickering glow of my laptop's screen is barely a distraction, they're just as real as anyone who's sat across the table from me, making jokes and stealing my chips. They're quite real, when you're standing on the right side of the mirror. But that's not where I get my ideas.
I get them from Jane.
I would offer to introduce you to Jane, but I can't; she's either with me or she isn't, and when she isn't with me, I don't know where she goes. There's a club in the seedy part of San Francisco where she meets to play poker every third Wednesday, betting epigrams and triolets and sometimes getting lucky enough to bring home a whole sonnet. She's always flushed and happy when she wins, and she slips through my window like a benediction, delivering kisses that taste like absinthe and red wine. Sometimes she loses, and those are the nights where she comes in late and sullen, waking me from a sound sleep while she demands peppermint tonic and aspirin. I try to stay out of her way on those nights, but she leaves her matchbooks on the bedside table, and by morning, the whole room smells of sweat and sulfur.
There's a house in New Orleans that her sister owns -- her name is Elizabeth, and she visits me sometimes, when Jane goes on vacation; her kisses are less shocking and more demanding at the same time, and I always yearn for Jane's whiskey sours when she's away -- and she stays there sometimes, dancing under the mossy trees. She has a flat in London, and an apartment in the East Village, near a jazz club where she sings, sometimes, when the mood strikes her. She gets around. Olympus, Hades, Heaven, Hell, Bristol and Beijing, the girl gets around. So I can't offer to let you meet her, because I don't know where she'll be tomorrow any more than I know where she is right now. You'll never see her -- hell, I rarely see her. I just clean up the things she leaves behind.
But I can tell you who she is.
Her name is Jane. Nothing fancier than that; she's been fancy, in her day, and like Mehitabel, she's had her ups and downs. There's life in the old girl yet. The world isn't always kind to Jane -- the world isn't always kind to anyone, when you get right down to it, and why should she be any different? If she has a last name, I've never known it. She's had friends and she’s left lovers, and she might have had a daughter once, but if so, I've never met her. She's outgrown her need for fancy things. It's enough for Jane that each day follows the day before, now; it's enough to know that there's always whiskey, and the smell of sawdust, and the little mermaid dancing down at her favorite bar.
I've tried to describe her again and again, and it always comes out wrong. Some things stay the same, every time she dances through my life: I know she wears too much makeup. She experiments with eye shadows, mixing shades and taking chances, so that sometimes she looks out from a white moth's wings and sometimes she's just another club kid who doesn't know when too much is too much. She rims her eyes with mascara and kohl, and when she cries, the tears leave black streaks down her cheeks. She doesn't cry often, but she forgets to wash her face before she falls into bed -- usually just before dawn -- and when she wakes the dark circles around her eyes make her look like a sex-starved ghost looking for one last goodbye.
Her foundation is pale because a tan would be false advertising, and a healthy pallor can forgive all sins. She wears no blush, and her lipstick is always red, red as blood on snow, red as roses, red as wickedness, and it leaves behind kisses like wounds. The lipstick never quite comes out, and the sheets of her lovers are marked with smears, like the ghosts of faded passion.
She dresses to suit herself, not the scene: her shoes are never practical, her shirts are cut too low and her skirts are cut too high, but even that isn't quite enough to catch her by. She's the one contra dancing in black lace and taffeta, with wire and gauze pixie wings tied to her back with neon shoelaces, or wearing a liquid silver evening gown as she kills the early morning hours in the corner booth of some tiny downtown diner. She makes no apologies and no promises, and when you take her home, that doesn't mean she'll be there in the morning. But she always leaves a dollar on the bedside table, in case you need bus fare back to wherever it is you found her. Jane knows what she is.
The rest is just conjecture, building from known principles. I think her hair is dark; I know it's straight, and fine, and that she wears it sleek and wild at the same time, so that she always looks as if she's just stumbled from the bedroom to the bar. I think it clings to your fingers when you stroke it, and that it smells like cheap dime-store shampoo -- vanilla this week, then blackcurrant, strawberry, peppermint, black tea. Whatever the market will bear.
I think her legs are long. I think her fingers must be gentle, with nails painted fuck-me red and calluses at their tips, because she's touched me many times, but never hurt me. I think her breasts are small and fine and sometimes bruised from corsets worn a bit too tight, or under-wires that punched their way through cheap and tattered cotton, or fingers that gripped a little too long. If you put a pea beneath her mattress she would toss and turn all night long, but she sleeps just fine in bus depots and on park benches. She understands the meaning of expediency.
I think her eyes are wild, but I couldn't tell you what color they are, even if I was staring into them.
I'd take you to her if I could, but I don't know what she does all day; I suspect it involves talk shows and hangovers, and whiskey and strawberries and chocolate syrup, and long, hyacinth-scented showers as she gets ready for the night to come collect her once again. She lives a lot of different lives in a lot of different places, and I'm not welcome in all of them. I've heard she makes a great cup of coffee but terrible omelets, and that she likes dark chocolate and buttered popcorn, and that if she sees you crying, she'll hold you until it stops, even if she doesn't know your name. She likes to ride buses and watch cities unspool all around her, but she hates to wait, and she doesn't read much. She loves to dance.
We met when I was young, and I don't remember how; it's too far behind me and too buried in the avalanches of the past, under overdue ideals and concepts that got graded a little more harshly than they really quite deserved. She was just there one day, handing me a tattered cocktail napkin covered in runic scribbles that might as well have been Phoenician, then turning and vanishing back to wherever it is she goes when she isn't with me. She was never a child. I didn't create her. She's just a woman doing her job in the worst and best ways possible, personified by need, creativity tearing through the bars with a wicked smile and a glass of hot rum in her hand.
I wonder who she's going home with tonight.
We have a working relationship, she and I -- I do all the work, she has all the relationships, and she leaves me notes I still can hardly decode. Sometimes she leaves things out, and I write epics from the wrong perspective, winding up with works half hers, half mine, and entirely the child of some misbegotten chance. And I'll admit, there are times when I wish they let you choose your muse; I could learn to work with Elizabeth, if I had to, or with Deirdre, who used to be Jane’s intern, before the stress began to wear her out and wear her down. She was little and anxious, with plaid skirts and brown, curly hair that she wore in high squirrel-tails, tied up with borrowed scrunchies. I could do it, I say, and maybe I can make myself believe it...for a while.
But then she comes through my window again, singing 'toujours gai toujours gai' with a timetable for the Babylon line in one hand and a handful of the rose owl's feathers in the other, and she smiles at me, and oh, her kisses taste like blackcurrants and cream, and oh, her hands can play me like a mandolin, and oh, I have never had another lover, or a better one, and I'll never want another after her. She fucks like an angel, all anger and affection, and she screams in perfect iambic pentameter, and the bite marks on my shoulders burn for days, and her lipstick never washes out. There's life in the old girl yet.
So I write her love letters and leave them where she might find them, and I send her postcards from strange places; 'how are you, having a lovely time, enclosed please find the first draft of Discount Armageddon, please tell me if I got the details wrong.' Because she knows all these people, knows them like I dream of them; she's kissed away Toby’s tears and danced with Winter under the Rush's Bend moon, she's slid her hand down Susan's skin until they both were shouting hallelujah, and when I ask her where the rose owl goes, it seems she always knows. I write her love letters and I pray she won't forget me, and so far I've been lucky; so far she's remembered.
That's her; that's Jane. And if you think she would change her present freedom to range for a castle or moated grange...
Well, you never knew Mehitabel all that well.
...introductions seem to be in order.
***
People ask me the question, you know. It seems a little bit silly to point that smoking gun at me -- you're supposed to ask serious writers, after all, and I'm not a serious writer; Shakespeare, Poe, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde, those are serious writers. I’m just a blonde girl from somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon, with a head full of stories and feet covered in runic scratches from the blackberry briers at the bottom of the gulch. But they ask me anyway.
Where do you get your ideas?
I have to admit that there's a certain urge to answer with 'from the moon from the sea from the stars from the rose owl -- she brings me gifts, you know, she brings me missives from the lady of the tides, she wraps them in briers and seals them with kisses, from the star wolf, from the train conductor on the Babylon Express, from the calico cat with the tri-corner hat -- she burns like a flame when the sun goes down -- from the goose girl, from the horses of Lir...' I could say that, and no one would argue with me, because no one argues with me when I'm clearly out of my mind. But none of that would be true.
Oh, I know all those people; sometimes, when the candles burn low and the flickering glow of my laptop's screen is barely a distraction, they're just as real as anyone who's sat across the table from me, making jokes and stealing my chips. They're quite real, when you're standing on the right side of the mirror. But that's not where I get my ideas.
I get them from Jane.
I would offer to introduce you to Jane, but I can't; she's either with me or she isn't, and when she isn't with me, I don't know where she goes. There's a club in the seedy part of San Francisco where she meets to play poker every third Wednesday, betting epigrams and triolets and sometimes getting lucky enough to bring home a whole sonnet. She's always flushed and happy when she wins, and she slips through my window like a benediction, delivering kisses that taste like absinthe and red wine. Sometimes she loses, and those are the nights where she comes in late and sullen, waking me from a sound sleep while she demands peppermint tonic and aspirin. I try to stay out of her way on those nights, but she leaves her matchbooks on the bedside table, and by morning, the whole room smells of sweat and sulfur.
There's a house in New Orleans that her sister owns -- her name is Elizabeth, and she visits me sometimes, when Jane goes on vacation; her kisses are less shocking and more demanding at the same time, and I always yearn for Jane's whiskey sours when she's away -- and she stays there sometimes, dancing under the mossy trees. She has a flat in London, and an apartment in the East Village, near a jazz club where she sings, sometimes, when the mood strikes her. She gets around. Olympus, Hades, Heaven, Hell, Bristol and Beijing, the girl gets around. So I can't offer to let you meet her, because I don't know where she'll be tomorrow any more than I know where she is right now. You'll never see her -- hell, I rarely see her. I just clean up the things she leaves behind.
But I can tell you who she is.
Her name is Jane. Nothing fancier than that; she's been fancy, in her day, and like Mehitabel, she's had her ups and downs. There's life in the old girl yet. The world isn't always kind to Jane -- the world isn't always kind to anyone, when you get right down to it, and why should she be any different? If she has a last name, I've never known it. She's had friends and she’s left lovers, and she might have had a daughter once, but if so, I've never met her. She's outgrown her need for fancy things. It's enough for Jane that each day follows the day before, now; it's enough to know that there's always whiskey, and the smell of sawdust, and the little mermaid dancing down at her favorite bar.
I've tried to describe her again and again, and it always comes out wrong. Some things stay the same, every time she dances through my life: I know she wears too much makeup. She experiments with eye shadows, mixing shades and taking chances, so that sometimes she looks out from a white moth's wings and sometimes she's just another club kid who doesn't know when too much is too much. She rims her eyes with mascara and kohl, and when she cries, the tears leave black streaks down her cheeks. She doesn't cry often, but she forgets to wash her face before she falls into bed -- usually just before dawn -- and when she wakes the dark circles around her eyes make her look like a sex-starved ghost looking for one last goodbye.
Her foundation is pale because a tan would be false advertising, and a healthy pallor can forgive all sins. She wears no blush, and her lipstick is always red, red as blood on snow, red as roses, red as wickedness, and it leaves behind kisses like wounds. The lipstick never quite comes out, and the sheets of her lovers are marked with smears, like the ghosts of faded passion.
She dresses to suit herself, not the scene: her shoes are never practical, her shirts are cut too low and her skirts are cut too high, but even that isn't quite enough to catch her by. She's the one contra dancing in black lace and taffeta, with wire and gauze pixie wings tied to her back with neon shoelaces, or wearing a liquid silver evening gown as she kills the early morning hours in the corner booth of some tiny downtown diner. She makes no apologies and no promises, and when you take her home, that doesn't mean she'll be there in the morning. But she always leaves a dollar on the bedside table, in case you need bus fare back to wherever it is you found her. Jane knows what she is.
The rest is just conjecture, building from known principles. I think her hair is dark; I know it's straight, and fine, and that she wears it sleek and wild at the same time, so that she always looks as if she's just stumbled from the bedroom to the bar. I think it clings to your fingers when you stroke it, and that it smells like cheap dime-store shampoo -- vanilla this week, then blackcurrant, strawberry, peppermint, black tea. Whatever the market will bear.
I think her legs are long. I think her fingers must be gentle, with nails painted fuck-me red and calluses at their tips, because she's touched me many times, but never hurt me. I think her breasts are small and fine and sometimes bruised from corsets worn a bit too tight, or under-wires that punched their way through cheap and tattered cotton, or fingers that gripped a little too long. If you put a pea beneath her mattress she would toss and turn all night long, but she sleeps just fine in bus depots and on park benches. She understands the meaning of expediency.
I think her eyes are wild, but I couldn't tell you what color they are, even if I was staring into them.
I'd take you to her if I could, but I don't know what she does all day; I suspect it involves talk shows and hangovers, and whiskey and strawberries and chocolate syrup, and long, hyacinth-scented showers as she gets ready for the night to come collect her once again. She lives a lot of different lives in a lot of different places, and I'm not welcome in all of them. I've heard she makes a great cup of coffee but terrible omelets, and that she likes dark chocolate and buttered popcorn, and that if she sees you crying, she'll hold you until it stops, even if she doesn't know your name. She likes to ride buses and watch cities unspool all around her, but she hates to wait, and she doesn't read much. She loves to dance.
We met when I was young, and I don't remember how; it's too far behind me and too buried in the avalanches of the past, under overdue ideals and concepts that got graded a little more harshly than they really quite deserved. She was just there one day, handing me a tattered cocktail napkin covered in runic scribbles that might as well have been Phoenician, then turning and vanishing back to wherever it is she goes when she isn't with me. She was never a child. I didn't create her. She's just a woman doing her job in the worst and best ways possible, personified by need, creativity tearing through the bars with a wicked smile and a glass of hot rum in her hand.
I wonder who she's going home with tonight.
We have a working relationship, she and I -- I do all the work, she has all the relationships, and she leaves me notes I still can hardly decode. Sometimes she leaves things out, and I write epics from the wrong perspective, winding up with works half hers, half mine, and entirely the child of some misbegotten chance. And I'll admit, there are times when I wish they let you choose your muse; I could learn to work with Elizabeth, if I had to, or with Deirdre, who used to be Jane’s intern, before the stress began to wear her out and wear her down. She was little and anxious, with plaid skirts and brown, curly hair that she wore in high squirrel-tails, tied up with borrowed scrunchies. I could do it, I say, and maybe I can make myself believe it...for a while.
But then she comes through my window again, singing 'toujours gai toujours gai' with a timetable for the Babylon line in one hand and a handful of the rose owl's feathers in the other, and she smiles at me, and oh, her kisses taste like blackcurrants and cream, and oh, her hands can play me like a mandolin, and oh, I have never had another lover, or a better one, and I'll never want another after her. She fucks like an angel, all anger and affection, and she screams in perfect iambic pentameter, and the bite marks on my shoulders burn for days, and her lipstick never washes out. There's life in the old girl yet.
So I write her love letters and leave them where she might find them, and I send her postcards from strange places; 'how are you, having a lovely time, enclosed please find the first draft of Discount Armageddon, please tell me if I got the details wrong.' Because she knows all these people, knows them like I dream of them; she's kissed away Toby’s tears and danced with Winter under the Rush's Bend moon, she's slid her hand down Susan's skin until they both were shouting hallelujah, and when I ask her where the rose owl goes, it seems she always knows. I write her love letters and I pray she won't forget me, and so far I've been lucky; so far she's remembered.
That's her; that's Jane. And if you think she would change her present freedom to range for a castle or moated grange...
Well, you never knew Mehitabel all that well.