Invocation

Goddess, I invoke thee with this cup of wine. The liquid I consume; the finer savor of the fragrance is fit sustenance for thy ethereal palate. Draw thou near, sit beside me, and guide my clumsy hands as they fumble o'er this square of cheap plastic junk, mass-produced by the helots of far Cathay. Goddess, sing!

Readers of old-timey books will recognize the above nonsense as an attempt at an obsolete literary device known as the Invocation of the Muse, developed (or at least popularized) by the ancient Greeks and later clubbed to death by the scribblers and poetasters of the literary dark age of the 18th Century. By raising its long-forgotten corpse here do I mean to suggest that I believe in the existence of an external spirit of creative power that can be tempted to emerge from wherever it normally hangs out to interact with humankind? No. And yet, I do. Kind of. At least I believe it's possible that such a thing can happen. But this is to be expected of a feeble mind like mine, because I am a terribly gullible person and I believe in all sorts of absurd trash.

I've never been able to discover why. I'd like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person, but I'm probably not particularly gifted that way, and the pool of destructive chemicals in which I've been steeping my brain for longer than I care to admit hasn't improved matters much. At any rate I have enough exposure to the Weekly Reader version of the scientific method to understand why smart people dismiss all manner of religious experience as magical thinking (when they condescend to be polite), and to concede that they're probably right. But I can't help it.

Some smart people now, trying to find a reality-based explanation for why folks who otherwise seem to be reasonably intelligent persist, right down to our present illuminated age of depleted uranium and GMOs, in believing in demonstrably false delusions like Muses and other such sky fairies, have found the answer in the thaumaturgical toybox of genetics. Magical thinking, they propose, is hard-wired into the brain. It's an evolutionary advantage: in the dangerous hardscrabble world of the Pleistocene, religious-minded troglodytes who believed that a benevolent sky fairy was looking out for them would be more likely to survive than analytical trogs who coolly evaluated any given situation and crafted their response on the facts.

So magical thinking is a process of natural selection, like huge hips you can shove a melon-headed little hominid through or a body that effortlessly packs on adipose reserves for the lean times, and as usual I appear to be a marvel of design. Two million years of survival development have honed my brain to reach out to every ancestor, tree spirit and idol floating between Olduvai and the Fertile Crescent. You can't fight Mother Nature. Why try? I've believed in probably just about every crackpot fantasy or bugaboo on record at one time or another, and although alcohol and the stress of living have mostly deadened the facility now, still at times I continue to believe, or, I admit, to want to believe, that something (I no longer feel I hold any clues as to what precisely) exists beyond the bounds of known reality. I don't know if that thing is sentient. I don't know if humans can explain or interact with it beyond merely perceiving its presence. In fact I don't even know that it is a single entity; perhaps there are many; perhaps the numbers are countless, and each one is a different type.

But the Muse is growing thirsty. Or perhaps I am. If anyone ever reads this, I suppose they're going to be thinking: you invoked a Muse, and all you got was this??? But remember, she's been vegetating for centuries before you were born, without even a Lord Hervey to train on, and the tool she's been called out of retirement to handle is, alas, none of the finest. Who wouldn't feel a little challenged?

I thank thee, Goddess, for thy aid. Let us share another cup of wine, and then I shall release thee to the happier realm of St. Brigid and ibis-headed Thoth.