Sweltering

Under the Muse's Power

When we swelter, we’re by definition uncomfortable. Humans have toleration limits for heat. But, what if the heat isn’t merely temperature? What if the heat is the power of hard work, the muse beating down our brow, or the pressure of modern life? August has the power to make is suffer in so much more than the season.

Regardless of whether August is the end of summer or winter (depending on your hemisphere,) there’s an air about August. The absence of holidays (unless you count Lammastide or Lughnasadh) gives a different pattern to the month. There’s no high profile “awareness” month for August. No one is embracing it for their specific culture’s attention. It just is. August hovers with the sweltering heat, stagnant, unrepentant. For my friends in New Zealand, August is winter lingering, not letting go, despite having overstayed its welcome. August is not the month many people look forward to. It’s the month that can’t leave soon enough.

Depite the lack of a specific day off, lots of people schedule a vacation or holiday for the month. But for others (the famous French debate of July versus August for time away,) August is the month back from vacation. It’s the time that school starts. It’s deadlines, sitting by a whirring fan, yearning for completion. August is back-to-the-grindstone. Salt mines from the salt-pouring rivulets of sweat down one’s back. It’s wondering what happened to one’s life. How did this month of productivity fall during the time most difficult to slog through such work?

But there is she is: the muse. She calls during the seasons of life when we least expect or even want her. When a writer is so lucky to both have the time in life to write, and to have the muse whisper in her ear, it doesn’t matter what other obligations call. Somehow, some way, writers find themselves pounding out (or scribbling out) the muse’s call. It flows; it beckons. It becomes easy to romanticize the life of a writer from decades past, tapping away in the sweltering heat of Tangiers in the summer sun, then sipping coffee in a cafe with other writers, debating experimental paragraph structure and possibilities with punctuation. If those writers from the mid-20th century could battle bedbugs and wartime evacuations, surely, 21st century writers can manage to sit at the keyboard, in air conditioning. We have the luxury of getting lost in the romance of the heat, without suffering for our art as they once did.

We suffer nonetheless. We have our own pressures that future generations will get to romanticize in their own way. We complain; we fuss. Then, we get through our sweltering season, just as humans have always done.