MUSE - 2

Poul spent his nights shivering in the sprawling cornfield that Mendel was now forming into poetry.

We create our own joy and suffering. Mendel grew to understand this. Poul, toward the end, in a muddled, frenzied kind of way, understood this. Beasely instinctively knew this. After all, didn’t he create Mendel?

Beasely never met Mendel but he understood the creative urge, and he understood the everyday person’s need for art. He understood our need for music, fiction, myth.

I took an idea that was given to me. I found my inspiration in the great artists throughout history and in myths. We wouldn’t have The Odyssey and The Iliad if Homer hadn’t preserved them. They were great stories of passion, greed, love and gods. They’ve lasted thousands of years. The story of Achilles and the fall of Troy were the subject of a TV miniseries and a movie in 2004.
Cervantes. Shakespeare. Twain. Writers who understood the conflicting passions of the human soul. They told good stories and the stories become myths.

Are my aspirations grandiose? Damn right they are. I want to reach farther than my grasp. Mendel reaches far beyond what’s humanly possible to clutch. But in doing so he brings back more than anyone before him.

Poul starts out as a simple, directionless fool who wants easy money. He learns there is no easy money. In fact, he works harder than any human should to continue making money that he never enjoys. His enlightenment comes when he finally realizes that his purpose is far, far bigger than money.

Beasely is driven by the ghost of his father and the instincts of a fox. He gets everything he wants except the one human thing he needs.
Both Mendel and Beasely are geniuses in their own way. But it’s Poul, the bumbler, the complainer, the nature-hater, who is the pathway between the two men. It’s Poul who is the enabler, the synapse between two geniuses. Without Poul as a live connection between the two, the songs would never have been given to the world.

Maybe on some other level I always understood this. But only now as I write this do I appreciate it. Art is a strange gift. We create it, then we spend our lives working to understand it.
Or, maybe like Mendel, we throw it away and move on to create something better. This is good, but not good enough. There’s something better in me. I feel it. I need to explore it, then create it. I will push on. I will create. If it’s not good enough I’ll keep pushing on. I’ll create, cast away, create.

Always, through the joy and despair, there is discovery and creation.

In. . .out. . .in. . .out. . . .With a guttural roar it spat itself forth again, offering, taking away, in a smooth, unending cycle of lovemaking between water and earth.

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