What to Expect

I’m sure by now I’ve probably confused some of my audience for a seemingly lack of focus. Allow me to explain: there is no focus.

I realise eclecticism might be a bit of a strategic error on my part. How can one have a successful blog when there are so many? You have to set yourself apart, be unique, and all that other hogwash. Of course, the ones who usually profit have extremely specific focuses, honing on one, two, or maybe even three areas of interest. (The audacity!)

However, whenever I sought to start this blog, no matter how much I did not want to, I did not care about the challenges I might face by not choosing an area of focus to fixate on and analyse. Rather I decided on doing what I mentioned in my first post: writing.

So why then would I limit myself? And why would I use popularity as a measure of success? What even is success? How does one define it against such a tempestuously changing tide like the Internet? It is superfluously absurd to do so, but I won’t divulge why I think so for now. I have other things to rant about.

For me, like so many other authors and poets, writing is essential. Writing is like breathing. I write about everything and anything because I think about everything and anything. And this will become more and more evident the longer I keep posting blog entries.

Someone once said that from the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. In my case, the hands write (or the fingers type). Being an impassioned person only makes this overflow annoyingly abundant and endless. Thus, my posts, or musings, will be such.

You could then say calling these “musings” was my strategy instead of choosing a specific focus, but why? 

Musings obviously is the plural form of the word, musing, which comes from the word muse. As Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines it, musing is described primarily as an intransitive verb that means, “To become absorbed in thought; especially: to think about something carefully and thoroughly.” It can even be a transitive verb and used to describe a way of speaking, such as “’I wonder what the Ancient Greeks thought of the Romans adopting their Hellenistic ways,’ she mused.”

All this comes from the Anglo-French word muser, meaning “to gape, idle, muse,” which in turn comes from the Old French mus which meant “mouth of an animal,” all from the Medieval Latin musus. As a noun, muse is defined as being “a state of deep thought or dreamy abstraction” or “a source of inspiration; especially: a guiding genius.” (One other fun definition is the Old French word muser, which meant “meditate, waste time,” which came from the Medieval Latin musum, or translated as “muzzle”.)

Then, lastly, there’s the obvious: the Greek goddesses, the Muses. It is from them the word originates, or rather, their name came from the original word of all the aforementioned, mousa. Literally translated from the Greek, mousa means “art” or “poetry”.

As the goddesses who were believed to be the source of inspiration for such expressions, they were aptly named. Depending on where your scholarly loyalties lie, you either accept that there were three or nine Muses. Whichever number you pick, their function was the same. Their inspirational role was not limited to just poetry. It seeped into music, science, philosophy, history, mathematics, and drama as well, but especially the arts.

As such, cultic practices attributed to the Muses –– besides calling on them for inspiration as you began writing an epic –– were gatherings and festivals around shrines dedicated in their honour including sacrifices and recitations. These sites of worship became known as a mousaion, or a museum. (Yes, museum originally means “cult place of the Muses”.)

The introduction of its more modern use was an effect of a movement during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, which sought to reestablish cultish practices to the Muses. In time, the term museum began circulating, and eventually became as we use it today, a place for a public display of such knowledge and expressions.

Thus, am I, like the ancients of old, calling upon the Muses to inspire me? To influence my writings? By no means! They are as cold and dead as the stone they were carved from by the Greeks. 

However, as the Muses were the inspirers of so many different aspects, not limited to one focus, I too will not limit myself as a muser. Perhaps then you could consider this a plausible part two of my initial post –– which abstractly explained why I chose the name I did for my site –– as now you know what to expect from my endless musings.

The answer? Anything.