The Artist & The Muse

**Since I clearly write for an audience, I'll get the context for this post out of the way first. In her book 'Queen of Dreams,' the author wrote that each story must necessarily be two stories within itself - the story of the teller, and that of the listener. That got me thinking about the muse, the inspiration behind a representation. I actually thought out a monologue that I liked a lot, but I was on a train and had nowhere to write it. Before I lose it completely, here's something like it.**

Her senses come awake like an urgent alarm, prickling with the intensity of to-do lists left incomplete too late; the moment of futile prayer before the exam paper's turned over and you stare at unfamiliar questions. She adopts what she hopes is a suitably engaging expression and immediately feels theatrical and spotlit. A butterfly in an entomology lab mounted on a stone-cold pedestal with nails holding it in place; a microscope boring down on its squirming body with singular focus. But of course, the butterfly's dead. There's no struggle. It lies there, willing to be interpreted as the lens sees it; contorted, distorted, kailedoscoped. Shattered in fragmented pieces so that it's at once more than the whole and less than the whole.

She interrupts her self-important litany to risk a quick coquettish glance, he's looking in the other direction. The audience she performs for is evidently distracted. The thought relieves her, and the relief irritates her. What could he be thinking of? Why can't she think of anything better than what he's thinking of? She must think ... deep thoughts. Thoughts of Aristotle. Eliot. Socrates. Sod it. What does he think when he looks at her? She looks down at her hands, ordinary hands, and imagines them in his work - dusky honey-brown sun-kissed elegance... so many adjectives to describe one noun... does the noun relate to the adjectives? Does the writer, while writing, expect to be interpreted with the depth that eager college students read into empty verses?

There, there are deep thoughts, if inconsequential. Thoughts that loop endlessly, with no real purpose than to occupy the mind, divert it in fantasy. So much time wasted oh the rhetoric. Ah, but intellect indulges itself by taking the time to wander. Those guided solely by rationale have no depth, no mystery, no enigma. The Mona Lisa had all day. And so must the muse.

She sees her enigma in his work of course, sees it as a combined sigh from the inspirer and the inspired; one imagining, one wishing. His work is like a shadow of her, a reflection he casts on the wall by beaming a giant spotlight at her. He sees golden when there's a burned brown, stillness in her restlessness, words when she's silent. He looks into her eyes and sees a soul that she doesn't feel - deep within her is a cavity that he projects in his work as overfilled and brimming. She's fascinated with her character - reaches out to touch it like a child seeing its reflection in the mirror for the first time. Thrown onto a canvass, there's no telling whether the paint defines the canvass or vice versa.

Bored at the impossible tangents her thoughts are taking, she forgets coquettry, drops the veneer, and looks around. Their eyes meet and he holds her gaze reflectively. Will his picture reflect the moment the mask slipped? Can he see her now? Her heart starts thumping. Love? In his works perhaps. This is the muse's story. The story the artist never tells, for it's a story beyond his fanciful imagination. Beyond the transcient boundaries of imagination itself lurks the ever more intriguing world of reality.