The Daily Muse | What does it mean to "Muse" | 15th Apr. '09

So what does it mean to muse? I got rapid fire reactions from people as I put up my Blog. The day I decided to muse in public was also the day I updated my Orkut profile - with photographs and interest section et. al.

Oh my God - is that you? You have put up photographs.
Well yes, can't I?
Yes, but it is so unlike you.

So what is like me?

On my blog on relationships and marriage, I intuited right. One set found it insightful, another was in a reflective mode and a third set was confused. It validated the 3 states that I wrote for comment. The 1st group was this which said that they found a part of themselves in my muse. The 2nd group gave the emotionally detached look. The 3rd group ranged from the placid, 'what abstract you write' to the hostile, 'you say all this in your blog, but your weekends are all planned with your study group and not with a girl!'

So what is like me? And do I have to prove myself to others? Do I need to continue to be what I have been like? And be a dead wood in the process? I feel pained on the reactions that come with hidden hostility. Is it not ok to try and understand yourself? Is it not ok to work on yourself? Is it not ok to find meaning and joy in the process of discovery and learning? Is it not ok to pursue your own passion? Mostly the pain is about not being understood.

So why do I want to be understood? For in the reaction of another set - those who resonated with what I wrote - I felt content. And a spark of 'wow, I was there with someone'. And I like this - I shun the former.

So do I write a muse because I would like to be understood? To re-experience a communion externally what was actually internal?

One of my friends wrote, '...you seem to be asking... I see you 'on the edge'... where are you in this? What's happening to you?...' I got worked up by that comment, 'here am I expressing myself, and here is this bugger asking me where I was!'

What does it mean to be there - does it mean to perpetually be in the experience? The other day I wrote in my journal on my current state of life, 'I feel like a traveler who is on a vast plateau - with no way to turn back - and no future road ahead. And in that moment of utter helpless loneliness, I feel weary and tired. I feel intoxicated by the sheer power of the moment. I feel like a budding seed - a germinating sprout - pregnant with the joy of growth and abundance.' But however hard I try, the words don't do justice. They are just approximations that my current cognitive and linguistic capabilities can express.

Is it not paradoxical. When I experience, I can't express. And when I express, I describe a past experience - a memory of the moment gone by. And that is mauled, battered, raped by the cunning mind, the ever eager to impress ego and the brain. In the name of adorning and expressing it aesthetically, it is pillaged and plundered. And when it lands on a blog or a journal, it is not the experience, but a memory, a figment, a word craft with past and current residual emotions.

Or could I call it a muse?