Shawn L. Bird

Are there reluctant muses? How many muses are embarrassed or dissatisfied with their role as someone else’s creative inspiration? Whatever the real nature of the relationship between the people involved, the creative one takes the facts of the other and covers individual identity with musical notes, pieces of paper, or splashes of paint. Reality becomes illusion.

A muse is a creation of aspiration on the journey to inspiration. That they may walk, talk, breathe, sing, dance or act is extraneous to the process. The muse simply exists as a precipice from which the imagination can leap. If the muse is worthy, the leap is not downward, toward the heavy reality of life, but upward, into the dreamlike world of possibility. Once gliding on the currents of the muse, the creator may stay in the air for years or even decades on the flow of ideas, images, and imaginings

While the real life person ages, decays, and even dies, the muse lives on in perpetual youth. The ephemeral something that creates the muse is extemporal. This is why Petrarch was able to write over three hundred sonnets to Laure, even after her death. Reports suggest that the two had never actually even met, and yet the dream of her fueled Petrarch’s writing for decades after his first glimpse of her. I understand his obsession. My own muse is a memory wrapped in a dream and tied with a reverie. There’s no accounting for the flashes that make a moment into a poem, a  nuance into a novel or a suggestion into a song.

From delusion
to illusion,
with the inspiration
comes the aspiration
for imagination
to become creation.