… But what is a Sleeping Muse? What is a slumbering Muse?
A Muse—that is, she from whom inspiration flows: perhaps fitfully for us, yet without interruption when seen from her own side; she who therefore abides within herself in a state of perpetual wakefulness; who inhabits that realm as we shall never be able to inhabit it, for she, unlike us, neither knows nor yields to weariness. And yet she, here, sleeps…
And so the question returns intact: what is a Sleeping Muse, a slumbering Muse? All the more so because it would seem that she does not sleep through negligence, that no distracted misstep has brought her eyelids shut. She sleeps—I would dare say—because we, being mortals unlike her, never quite succeed in crossing the threshold of her immortal realm, which is dream to us but plenitude of life to her.
A sleeping Muse, a slumbering Muse, may then be nothing other than the image of our own dreaming, of our desire lying outstretched in pursuit of the ungraspable. And if it is true that one must awaken to that dream, rather than awaken from it—which would be a miserable thing indeed—then perhaps one must begin by recognizing that the dream of the Muse lies, moreover, asleep in all things…
