If I had a muse

 They say that every writer has his muse.  They've said this for quite a long time.  Still, I'm not entirely sure what it means.  

A muse, I suppose, is a memory of someone or something that pushes you to create.  Sometimes it's a beauty that inspires, but more often, it's a wound that won't heal or a memory that can't resolve itself.

Williams' muse, they say, was probably his mother.  Her name was Edwina, but on stage, she was Amanda, Cat, Blanche, and more.  Memories of his mother and her efforts to deal with the declivity in her life inform nearly all of his work.  It's not a loving memory, either.  A muse doesn't have to be a pleasant force.    

Shakespeare had his "Dark Lady."  Nobody really knows who she was, although there are some interesting theories.  It's very likely that she was no Anne Hathaway, his wife.  

Wilde's muse was a beautiful young man that sent him to prison and kicked off the Victorian effort to eliminate homosexuality.   Queensbury was very clearly the inspiration for Dorian Gray.  Known for his chamber comedies, his most revealing work is a gothic horror about a murderous young man with a mirror that kept him beautiful--very much a description of his experience with Queensbury.

If I have a muse, it's an imaginary dog a man on the radio talked about when I was a very little boy.  There are certain memories of smokey-eyed beauties that sometimes motivates my work, but feist-dog is the summation of my life from my flickering waking into sentience through my life until the day my father died.  Feist-dog is a well of all the souls that moved in the firmament above me when I was young, including Jim Neal, who invented him--although I'm sure even he would admit that Feist-Dog really came from Faulkner, and Faulkner would most likely say, Feist-Dog came from the fecund dark loam of Mississippi.  

One of the reasons there are so many great writers from Mississippi is that being from Mississippi is a very complicated thing, and living here is still complicated, even if you're not from here.  I include Memphis in my definition of Mississippi because it's more delta than it is mountain.  The northernmost point of Mississippi is the fountain in the Peabody Hotel.  

What makes Mississippi complicated is we'll kill you for acting up.  We'll kill you for being different, but then we'll invite you into our home to watch over our infant children.  We send our children to cotillion so they'll have proper manners, and we'll have debutante balls so our daughters can lead the next generation into polite society.  

If a muse is a thing that pushes you to write and gives you things to write about, then my muse is an imaginary dog that holds Mississippi inside of him.  

In Absalom, Absalom! Quinten Compson is asked why he hates the South; he famously says, "I don’t, I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”  That's very likely a reflection of Faulkner's complicated feelings about his homeland.  Faulkner died in Oxford.  He had the money to go anywhere, but he died in Oxford.  He may have hated the South, but he never left it.  

Faulkner nursed large quantities of bourbon while his muse bubbled over in his brain.  Miss Eudora did, too, but in much lesser quantities.  Twelve years younger than Faulkner, they will always be the bookends of Mississippi writers in my mind.  Everyone else fits between them.  

Ultimately, I don't know what makes anyone write.  Whatever it is, sometimes it won't let me alone.  On nights like tonight, when I just can't stop writing, it's not hard to imagine a little dog fiercely tugging my pants leg, trying to force me to do something; I don't know what.