Our Vision of the Muse

Here we have to the left, Polyhymnia the Muse of lyric poetry pictured. I fully understand the mythological creation of the muse of various entities but I am altogether amused by our common day practice of viewing our muse in perhaps an erotic representation. Almost a pornographic implant in the mind as if this is the necessary level in which one must go to the be creative. An arousal if you will. And maybe arousing that something within is what is necessary to move into a creatively fertile mode. Sure, it's fun on some level to suppose that our muse sits at the edge of our desk, long legs exposed, in some flauntingly evil way to attract our attention and impose upon us some grand element of creative juice that sparks our creative libido.[Insert apologies to my female readers who surely have a different image in mind. Or maybe not.]

Our typical vision of the muse calls upon us to look to an external source. I suppose we've all had examples of persons or even inanimate objects that have provided us with a spark of imagination that was the breakthrough of some piece of art. But I feel like deep down inside each of us, that's where the muse really is.

I know that all around us are beautiful, startling, magnificent, frightening, majestic, myopic, shocking and luminescent things that give us pause and allows us to think beyond the moment. But I suspect it is the inner muse within our own minds and not some mythology that takes those things we see and experience and goes outside the box and makes of them something new and allows us to give birth to that which is uniquely ours in a collaborative conception with our inner muse.

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