Maybe there is nothing in the world to explain the world, but we try hard anyway. We try to define the illusive, mysterious quicksilver we call inspiration.
“God on the job,” says author/actor James McEachin, referring to both inspiration and the things that inspire us.
“Telephone poems,” a poet friend says, referring to the verses that come fully formed on awakening, as if in the night she received celestial dictation.
“The collective unconscious,” adds another friend, seeking answers in the teachings of Jung.
Eureka moments. Epiphanies. Flashes and fragments of insight. Revelatory dreams. These are the creative gifts that bring us to our knees in gratitude and wonderment, but by what mysterious process do they, seemingly unbidden, arrive? Where does inspiration spring from? How do we court it? Can we woo it?
The ancients believed in Muses and so do writers. How could we not? There is a strong element of the mystical in inspiration.
Theodore Roethke wept for joy when he completed his poem “The Dance,” and acknowledged that he had felt a Presence in the room helping him, an attendant spirit akin to the Greek daemon. Harriet Beecher Stowe believed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was written by Another Hand.
Even writers working at the cusp of the twenty-first century acknowledge it. We write in the middle of a magic circle, said Ralph Ellison. August Wilson called it the “land of magic.”
Still, the question of divine inspiration tends to make writers edgy. Short story writer Craig Moody maintains the whole subject is taboo. “We’re skittish about the issue because it verges on the spiritual and metaphysical, or at least we’ve convinced ourselves it does,” he says. “What it really is is this: We’re afraid another writer might somehow steal our mojo. Or that we might jinx it by talking about it.” Writers, he maintains, are just as fascinated and perplexed as anyone about where ideas come from.
And as in awe of it.
People ask writers all the time where they get ideas and the truth is they come like gifts. If we are wise, we are open to receiving. Our minds soften their grip on reality and open to the imagination. Woolgathering, our grandmothers called it.
While reading the brand name on a box of Pasta della Nonna noodles Massachusetts writer Virginia Reiser absently-mindedly translated it from Italian. Pasta of the grandmother. From this came the impetus for “Pasta della Nonna” the lovely story that won first prize in a CapeWomen magazine fiction contest, and which opens, “Eat, eat,” my Nonna said. “You are like cappellini – too thin to hold a sauce.”
Recently Reiser was in her car with her husband when, out of the ether, this question occurred to her: How did the Spirit of St. Louis get back to the United States since Lindbergh didn’t fly it? There was an immediate click of recognition. She held in her mind the first kernel of story.
Creative triggers surround us: A newspaper headline. The writings of another author. A tree branch that captures a shaft of light in a certain way. A snippet of overheard conversation. An inchworm’s flailing progress. A memory resurfaced. The first line of a story that arrives spontaneously and whole. Our part is to be open to them.
There are, I think, two keys which unlock the passage for inspiration: Play and Work.
Play liberates us from analytical thinking and frees the mind for ideas to enter. Imagination, after all, requires room. “I am an elaborate daydreamer,” says novelist Gloria Naylor, reminding us that muse is a verb, as well as a noun. To muse is to envision, to daydream, to call up creative imagination. The root of inspiration is inspire, to breathe in. The act of imagining breathes new life into our labor.
A commitment to work is the other component. In that way it is like the story of the man who prayed to God every morning to win the lottery. Month after month, year after year, he fervently prayed to hit it big. When he died, he confronted God and asked why, since he had been faithful in his prayers, God had not granted them. Responded the Lord, “You might at least have purchased a ticket.” We can pray for inspiration, but the moment of recognition comes because we have been preparing for it and it can only come when we are primed. Work, like play, serves to open the channels.
I know I am most likely to receive an inspired thought when I have been writing regularly and so I regard my daily stint of work as a form of cloud seeding, as if the act of writing itself produces ideas. Creativity is a journey, a friend once said. We have to visit the right places on the way and a path of industry leads us to these right places.
I think, too, that the spirit of creative thought resides not only “out there” but inside us as well. Sir Philip Sidney wrote, “’Fool,” said my muse to me. ‘Look in thy heart and create.’”
“In thy heart.” So perhaps, the secret of inspiration is that, like most good things, it is born of passion and love.