What is a muse ?

Wikipedia (the retard bicyclopedia anyone may edit) has the word down as "source of inspiration", some bands, films and places. Plus people, magazines and whatnot. Isn't it amusing how everything's a band, a magazine, a film and so forth according to that fetid swamp ? You'd think the world started about one hundred years ago.

Wikitionary, the sister project, explains it as "source of inspiration" ; also "poet, bard" - which as far as I know is thoroughly original researchⁱ ; to be lost in thought etc.

This is all fine and dandy, but consider an old proverb, to wit :

'Tis as hard to find a Hare without a Muse,
As a woman without excuse.

It took many forms across the endless sea of time, such as Greene's notation cca 1580 ("'Tis as hard to finde a Hare without a Muse, As a woman without a scuse."), Howell's cca 1660 ("Take a hare without a muse and a knave without excuse and hang them up.") or Fuller's cca 1730 ("Find you without excuse and had a hare without a muse."). So, what's a muse ? And what does a hare want with it ?

Find the muse ?

Pretty much all rodents construct pathways through their territory, which they then stick to religiously. The common house mouse is no different from a hare in this respect. Even hedgehogs stick to this procedure. There's plenty of good reason for it, not muchly dissimilar to the reason we people build roads in certain places and stick to moving through them rather than randomly across the fields : it's safer. Provided the road is maintained it's also easier on the feet or wheels.

These roads will sometimes meet obstacles, and the inventive nature of the rodent being what it is (much like in the case of people), a hole will be made through the obstacle - such as a bush, a wedge or even a wall. This hole is called, in the case of rodents a muse and in the case of humans a tunnel. The disadvantage of the hole is, of course, that its industry constitutes a very remarkable disturbance of the patters of plain and unadorned nature, which happens to be exactly how predators capture their prey.ⁱⁱ

So there you have it, the third partner in the game of catch Tom and Jerry engage is, of course, the Muse. The hole, which Jerry perpetually penetrates and Tom would him deny, making the connection with the 1600s Commedia. Indeed Tom is usually Pantalone and Jerry makes a pretty decent Scaramuccia in most cases. Colombina, in our modern and muchly advanced society - which has certainly progressed above and beyond the understanding of the Ancients not to mention soundly and finally defeated both phallocentrism and anarchopaternalism - is reduced to her essence as a simple hole, and behaves as part of furniture. Apt, I would say.

The virtues of blissful idiocy (or in other words wikipedia "literacy") are today as always the same : he who has no clue can be convinced of anything whatsoever and easily enough.

1. It does ask if "they can add a quote of Milton to that definition", which apparently they can not. A pity, it's always fun to see how exactly the illiterate crowd misread Milton this time. [↩]
2. Which, incidentally, reminds me of an old (Romanian) joke :

   A very very poor and famished Obama runs into a well to do Bush.
   "How the Hell do you manage to do so well in this time of crisis and poverty ?" wants to know Obama.
   "Ah, easy enough. I am now a hunter." replies Bush.
   "A hunter ?!"
   "Yes. No further than yesterday I noticed a hole. I went "uuu!" in the hole, a bear came out, I shot it and sold the skin for three gold ounces."
   "Extraordinary! Marvelous! Unracist!" exclaimed Obama. "I shall try this myself!"

   A week later a very famished and pretty badly beat up Obama runs into the still well to do Bush.
   "Whatever happened to you!"
   "I went around and found the biggest, darkest hole there was, right ?"
   "Yea..."
   "And I went "uuuu!" into it... and the response came "uuuu!". So I went again, and the response came again..."
   "And ?"
   "And then the train ran me over."

   [↩]