A Muse You Can Use

I have a personal relationship with God -- he hates me. How else would I end up with the Barbara Streisand song "People" stuck in my head?

"People who need people are the luckiest people in the world …" That doesn't even make sense. How is it lucky to need anything, especially people, the most unreliable creatures on earth besides cats?

They say when you get a song stuck in your head it's reflective of something going on in your life, and I think I got stuck with this curdled number because I was thinking about, well, the people we sometimes need. Not for practical purposes, like giving us rides or signing our checks. I mean the people we need for motivation -- people we don't expect and may never even know very well: our muses.

It seems like such a wispy concept, the muse; something that belongs to a softer, greener time when men swanned around England in puffy shirts talking about beauty (the kind of beauty that didn't involve Pottery Barn). Ours seems like too crass a time for such prettiness: It's kind of hard to imagine a muse coming up with the idea for the Paris Hilton porn flick, or Burger King.

But your muse is not some winged creature that flits from the pages of a magazine, spewing fairy dust and giving you great ideas -- that's the storybook version. The Muses were the nine Greek goddesses who oversaw artistic, scientific and academic pursuits, and since then, people have used the term to explain an impassioned creative spark: "Stephen Colbert was visited by the muse when he wrote that White House Correspondents' Dinner speech. He might have even been felt up by the muse; it was that good."

So the goddess association is historic, but a real-life creative muse can be anybody. And their influence, whether romantic or platonic, can be as strong as a rip current. You're minding your own business and suddenly you find yourself in an eye-lock with a creature so beautiful it makes the Louvre look like a garage sale. You try to act casual, but your head is swimming with incomprehension at how the world can just continue turning so casually as this creature abandons the heavens for your stupid town. Why did no one tell you? You would have dressed better. And gotten a Ph.D. And worked out.

Thus the refurbishing begins, inspired by something wildly random but terribly powerful. It can be a lot like falling in love -- it can actually be love or infatuation, or just a platonic fire that smolders warmly but keeps our potential from going cold. "You make me want to be a better man," Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt in the film "As Good as It Gets," and that's exactly what the muse does.

I can count 10 personal muses over the years, and all made me better: smarter, more well-traveled, even healthier. The projects and parts of yourself you'd given up on seem easy with them around. Of course you can become a writer, or sail around the world, or make a million dollars. Fate has finally provided a motive: Someone more worth impressing than you are.

I can hear every therapist in the country whipping out their business cards and telling me, in that patient voice used on slow learners, "You should be the person you want to impress the most." But a muse is actually the opposite of a codependency or crutch: It's when someone else makes you feel brave enough to extend yourself farther into the world, immune to the criticism of the many because you're secure in the one.

Speaking of extending yourself, sometimes a muse can turn out to be someone really hot, and what you thought was elevated creativity is actually just horniness. Sexual and creative arousal are uncannily similar: Both increase your energy like a sextuple espresso, and both convey a part of your soul to another person. When the creative and sexual impulses do intertwine, the result varies: Sometimes couples can ignite each other's brilliance for years, sometimes love's satisfaction can dull the creative hunger, and some people are just around long enough to propel us to the next space on the game board. Even fate employs temps.