M.I.T*

* Muse in Training

This morning I was on facebook (yup) and I noticed the following comment "I am almost back in Muse Shape". I was rather tickled by the notion of one training to be a muse, or working on themselves to get them back to museworthy. And I have been mulling on the value of this since.

It seems to me we all are very open with more common goals. We wish to be worthy of love, desire, admiration, attention, even adequte compensation.
These goals have much to do with our closer personal relationships and livelihood. They are interactive, generally have a certain level of depth, and often a certain level of necessity.

But to be a muse. Oh to be a muse. To consider this calls to an even broader question: what is a muse.
I mean, we all know what a muse is on a mythical level. Something sent down to the heavens to inspire creativity. They are a devise, and the relationship implied is mostly one side: after all we are dealing with the divine, and it doesn't need anything from you, it is here for you.

Actual human muses get a little more complicated. They think and live and breathe and require interaction, feeding, love, nutrition. They are, as noted, human.
And when inspiring another it is often clear what the other gets. Again, inspiration. And the glory of being inspired by a muse is how little is has to do with the muse on so many levels and how much it has to do with the trigger they provide to make a little part of your own brain fire, light up, spurn you on.

But what does the muse get? In the case of the comment above, I find it worth noting that this was a woman to woman, heterosexual relationship based comment. This was not a romance based comment. Atleast, not in sexual terms. And yet she was excited to be her muse again?
How, why, to what end.

I can only contend this is the part of a person who's highest tip of self esteem, and self romance, if not self love, is sparked. To aim to be a muse is to aim to also fire up something in yourself you think others will find inspirational. To aim to be a specific persons muse is even more interesting: because you are attempting to hit a mark so obscure, and yet specific, that the relationship becomes sublime. I want you to look at me and not feel closer to me, I want you to feel closer to g-d.

Think about that.

I think about that because it is complicated. I also suspect most of us (and I know I have) want to be a muse atleast once in our lives. Sometimes to our lover, although I suspec that is needlessly complicated and misguided, sometimes to the masses. We want to, just for a moment, not just be smart or beautiful, but challenging and inspirational. It is, on some level, or our 15 minutes of fame.

And some poeple will end up a muse to many for generations, while others can only hope someone, somewhere, catches a glimpse of them and is changed, altered and driven just a bit more than they ever would have been, for that fleeting sight.

And it seems, in general, like a poor idea to train to be a muse at all times, or atleast to aim to be a muse. Mostly for it's narrow focus, but also for the undeniable likilhood of consequential disspointment. But yet...but yet I can't help but to think if a few more of us were in muse training, we explicitly aiming to inspire as such, when on the path to self improvement, we might excite ourselves a lot more as well. We might, even, become our own kind of muse.