On The Muse
I consciously don’t use this word that starts with ‘I’. Now, looking back over the challenge again, I ask for her to provide the necessary portions. I avoid using it like I avoid looking directly at the sun. I fear it’s power and origin while I love its power and origin, and this makes me feel strange.
This thing I do and don’t want to understand isn’t a thing in the physical sense. Even though it isn’t always a thing, it can come from a thing, as much as it can come from another idea or anything at all. This ‘I’ word is my ‘He who must not be named’ because I want to preserve its powers.
I want to know everything and nothing about it at the same time, it’s like love in that way. I don’t want to scare it off, so I try to caress it. To better know where it came from. To see how it makes me, if not why it makes me feel, or what it’s made from.
I’m scared of it sometimes. Sometimes it comes from a dark place that I lust after too much. Too often it tries to push the light into the dark and fails, resulting in cheesy, slasher-flick fare that shouldn’t have made it to the page let alone off it.
Let’s stop calling it ‘I’ anything, or ‘it’. Let’s call it her, or she, like the muses of ancient Greek myth, or, better yet a sailor’s ship. Sometimes she’s magic — a daze where seconds turn into minutes, moments into monuments. Sometimes I know her like a twin. In other, noisier times, I feel like I’ll never know her again. Those are the moments I die. Even as Sisyphus mocks me, I have a foolish certainty of hope that she will return, if only because I’ve known her to exist, and that isn’t mythology to me.
