Nonfiction by Linda Briskin
Muse is elusive. She can be Calliope, the Greek goddess of eloquence. Or Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, or Clio, the goddess of memory. Sometimes she is Urania singing with the stars or Thalia chanting to the ferns as they uncurl in the spring.
The last time I saw Muse, I was trying to meditate while sitting on a rock in densely tangled brush in a Toronto ravine. Rippling water in the creek, filtered summer sun patterning the ground, and spirited bird conversations all distracted. Muse settled beside me, her breath sweet and warm, her eyes closed, our shoulders suddenly touching. She was humming. I joined her and together we offered a melody to the trees.
Perhaps I first met Muse in the library in a small white church perched on a hill, not far from my school in Montréal. I was eight. She was dressed as a librarian—brown tweed skirt, sensible shoes, glasses on a string. She never scolded me for surrounding myself with teetering piles of books in the far back corner. We didn’t really talk, but she saw me, her gaze intent as if she knew and approved of my obsession with words, my passion for stories, my delight in smoothing the cover of a new book. She always saved one for me: an invitation to a place where I could
disappear and perhaps find myself. A gift.
Decades passed and Muse has always been a presence, if inconstant and capricious. Sometimes I catch a trace of her in a discarded twist of striped ribbon, or a child sitting absolutely still on the stairs of a shabby house with a bright blue door. Perhaps a hint of her in an envelope decorated with elaborate calligraphy and abandoned on a park bench. Or in the reflections of clouds and trees in pools of water after a storm.
I’m certain I glimpsed her one summer while kayaking on Stony Lake. Although difficult to discern through the sun’s brightness, Muse seemed to float casually in the air, enveloped in almost translucent gossamer. Tantalizing, just at the edge of my awareness. Then she was in the water: a mermaid, her scales sleek, her locks glistening, her arms reaching out. Remember, her look instructed.
I do remember a dullish day in the interstice between fall and winter on a rare trip on the Toronto subway. I caught her reflection in a window. Her red felt cap had a peacock feather tucked in the brim, swaying with the clickety-clack of the wheels. Inspired, I wrote:
Lucy unearths the red felt cap carefully wrapped in tissue from a hatbox buried in the back of her great-aunt Mary’s closet. Mary was a milliner in her youth and made hats in her small store on St. Denis. Why did she keep this one, Lucy wondered.
No glimpse of Muse, not for many months now, not since the encounter in the ravine. But today at a gathering of writers, where I sit deep in a corner, she is suddenly perched on a stool next to me, vibrating with an energy both compelling and irritating. She is twirling her long braid—an annoying habit. She turns to me with an eager smile. “What’s your favourite word?” she asks.
“About you?” I reply, my voice curt, my stare hostile. “Unpredictable, fleeting, evanescent, temperamental, unstable, erratic, fanciful, transient, provocative, obstinate, uncompromising. You’re a shadow in a dark room, a slight movement in the wind, a musical note at the edge of what’s audible.”
Are you elusive because I bore you? The thought flits through my mind. I want you to be an enduring whisper in my ear, at my service. Constancy, loyalty—all that the world is not. I’m suddenly wild with urgency and desire. Then I start to laugh, hiccupping, almost sobbing. Who doesn’t yearn for such devotion? To be seen and known?
Muse tilts her head toward me, her light blue eyes intent. “Expectations and demands turn me inside out,” she says. “ I sink into silence and splinter into pieces. I’m ephemeral. I delight in winding myself in and around the green shoots of spring. I relish eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table in a café and lying down on a page of text—each letter a fascination. Keep me close, but let me twirl and flutter, and dance to the words I hear. I do whisper in your ear. Listen for it.”
Then we are humming, not quite in tune but together.
Linda Briskin is a writer and fine art photographer. Her CNF embraces hybrid forms, makes quirky connections and highlights social justice themes—quietly. As a photographer, she is intrigued by the permeability between the remembered and the imagined, and the ambiguities in what we choose to see. @linda.briskin and https://www.lindabriskinphotography.com/.
