The Problem of Authority

We're supposed to have a Muse -- really a daemon, in the old sense. We're supposed to not know why we write what we write. It's supposed to be a movement of energies beyond our accounting, as often it seems. But this general view opens up a trap: that writing a poem is being given a guided tour of you and your quirks, should the Muse be amused to do so. The Muse is the cause of all this autobiography turned to phrase! Trust the Muse!

What if a poem is a movement of your conscience instead? -- with you and your quirks doing the lifting, the shifting of anecdotes and understandings along lines of illumination? If a poem is wholly *yours* to make, how nicely and naturally it frees you from writing it about you; if you accept the challenge. (And with no external agent interested in you, your own interest in you is then that much harder to hide.) You're not then the mystery nor the mysterious instrument. You're just you, with a conscience boiling over, once in a great while the whole spilled mess crystallizing.

Sorry. This isn't an argument; just an idea, and a version of a very old one. With Brahman or God to look forward to attaining, joining, or serving well, it's easy to think our lives are lines of eternity and as such, significant to the very last detail. And maybe they are! But perhaps only if we direct them toward something larger than life-bound, and only if we excavate meaning from their events -- hoping that's what it is, anyway. If instead we merely record, content no matter the content (as long as enough personal pleasure sweetens the mix), then I would worry these lines of eternity, these lives of ours, are merely geometric: cold as ice without a reason to exist. So it's a less-than-airtight catch-22: External agency lording over us can allow us to slip more comfortably back into our (then, because unstriving, less meaningful) lives, while the lack of one can spur us to make what matters matter and fall, if not into nihilism, into the tragic scenario of believing we alone did this. Curious, this silent God of ours.