the voice of creativity

[egypturnash]

The stick began to move. He applied it to the dirt and was pleased with the old, familiar feeling of tapping Death's Radio, the source of poetry. In Orphé, a film he had first seen at age thirteen, Death had come for the modern beat poet Orpheus as a woman in a large black limousine. The limousine's radio played provocative nonsense phrases that impressed Orpheus with their purity and poetic essence. When the poetry came pure and clean, Michael sometimes felt he was tuned to Death's Radio.

Sometimes he had the impression that he wasn't really the author of a poem, that Death's Radio allocated poems by queue number and not by personality.

- Greg Bear, The Infinity Concerto

This image, this characterization of inspiration, stuck with me from the very first time I read the book*. It really captures that feeling that sometimes the Muses are speaking through you rather than making you realize your own ideas. A lot of my Drowning City, at least in its present form as a collection of fragments and notes, is straight from Death's Radio. I will surely make it more mine in the long process between jotted-down concept and finished comic-book pages, but there's this still this difference from my other attempts at long-form pieces - it comes from somewhere other than my conscious mind...

*I believe it's now available in an omnibus with the sequel; the whole thing is called Songs of Earth & Power.