Grayson begs Neon for inspiration

“Will you give me nothing?” Greyson whispered with his face in his hands, as to a lover who had refused him one time too many. “You have the thing I need – can’t do anything with it yourself. Can’t eat it, can’t sing it, can’t make love to it – but you hoard nonetheless, and I have… nothing. Without you I have nothing.”

            The muse softened with this last confession. Withholding was not Neon’s natural posture. She was among the more generous muses, and was faulted for it at times. More self-contained muses conjectured that the results of her donations tended to be rather pedestrian as a result – lacked the gravitas of the gifts given by truly selective muses.

And it was true. Neon had begun to notice her devotees were more likely to take Neon’s morsels for granted, fail to savor them with the painstaking humility necessary to translate insight into invention. Her reputation for being generous (if not terribly exceptional) had earned her something of a cult following among the more impetuous of creators…but she did yearn to make a name for herself among the other muses, and (oh!) to earn the love of the proud among of her supplicants. Even as that meant sacrificing the patronage of those whose knees bent to her only out of eagerness for another titillating splash of inspiration.

But refusing Grayson was more challenging than the usual coquetry Neon had been practicing. This young man, she thought rather tenderly, made much of the humble gifts she gave him. An artist, as many of Neon’s constituents were, he spared no inch of insight when he put paint to the canvases she moved him to imagine. He didn’t rush the work in a hurry toward payoff and the next project. He seemed to enjoy the challenges of weaving Neon’s threads into the most nuanced and complete product he could. It was as if he sensed her material lacked the inherent genius some artists required, and rather held merely the raw potential to be made great by his craftsmanship and his affection alone.

Grayson was the kind of patron Neon wanted to maintain her bond with, while releasing less serious creators to attach themselves to other muses. But Grayson needed to learn to seek her gifts persistently, she felt. He needed to be trained to wait on her kindness, to accept denial, if he were ever to develop the kind of deference she needed from him. This rueful confession, “Without you I have nothing,” it offered Neon her first taste of bittersweet fruit her labor had sown.