to be haunted and inspired

Ghosts and muses.  Let's think about both.  Last Wednesday in the bookstore,  I ran into  the widow of a beloved Washington man of letters who had also been my MFA advisor.  I have long admired and liked this woman, and as we began catching up, she told me she had recently begun writing about her late husband. It was new terrain, since she had never been a writer before.  Now she sits at her late husband's desk and asks him to guide her.  She's writing about the first few weeks of their love affair - and also the last few weeks of his life.  It was difficult, she said, but also a powerful solace.

So I told her something that happened to me when I was writing my novel I KNOW WHERE I AM WHEN I'M FALLING which is largely about a man I once loved. At the end of the novel, I imagine how he might have died at sea.

I was living in Rome when I wrote a lot of that book and I was also teaching at The American University of Rome.  This particular afternoon, I had been writing the part where I imagined him dying, and having gone very far into my imagination, I needed a break.

 So I stopped writing, and turned my thoughts to a course I was teaching.  Suddenly the opening lines of Dickens' Hard Times came to mind - "Now, what I want is Facts."  It struck me as amusing, and I thought I might begin here, so I turned to the bookcase behind me, to see if I had a copy of that novel.  Turns out, I didn't. 

Bear with me, because here comes the haunting.  Either that, or it was a series of odd coincidences worthy of Dickens himself.  Because when I saw I didn't have a copy of Hard Times, I took down another Dickens' novel, Bleak House and opened the book at random.  To my surprise, I discovered a card, that had been slid into the book many years before.

tucked into a copy of Bleak House

 It came from my former lover.  He had written this card to me.  I opened it and this is what I read:

his message

Astonished, I then found a second card in the book - a Christmas card from the same man.

I have no recollection of the original context

I couldn't remember the original context of that message.   But eager for more apparent 'messages' from beyond the grave, I took at random a second book from the shelf - a book from the same incomplete Dickens' collection,  Child's History of England and Christmas Stories.  

Once again, I opened the volume at random - and my eyes fell on these words:

 A Message from the Sea

"Amanda!" exclaimed my friend in the bookstore, when I told her this story.

"I know!" I replied.  "Which goes to show, we must listen out for messages."  After all, I told her, we can think about them, so why shouldn't they be able to think about us?

"Well," she said, "He better be thinking about me!"

Sometimes we are haunted by ghosts from the past and writing about them breathes new life into them - gives them their second coming.

And muses?  Well, perhaps they are more benign, more gracious. They are the ones we encounter on occasion and for whatever reason, they light up the creative imagination. A friend recently observed that really, a girl need never know that she is someone's muse.  Dante it is said, never met Beatrice.  He only saw her leaving church one morning and from then on he was done for. She was his inspiration!  Does it matter why?  Which is to say, you never know where inspiration comes from. And you should never underestimate the power of the world to throw something surprising in your direction.  Stay receptive! We need to harness the blessings of all our ghosts and muses.