The Heavy Weight of Inspiration

“Where” every artist, writer, creator is asked, “do you find your inspiration? What is it in your surroundings, in your home, your friends, your contacts, the world in general, that moves you to create whatever it is that you create? What is it”, they seem to be saying, “that you can see, that inspires you to greatness, which I cannot see?” As if any artist, regardless of their used medium, were able to give a quick How To on successful creativity. As some might say: you either have it, or you have it not. You have either learned how to see and how to evaluate, or you have not. And that seeing and evaluation is not something we are likely to learn in a school, in college, even in our daily lives, unless our eyes and senses are open to what it is which could inspire us. The education system, for what it is, once helped us form what we had seen into an idea, into a firm notion, if we were taught in the right way, through the Arts. And then practice, the gaining of experience, brought a final smooth surface to the whole. Yet two people, living through the same experiences, attending the same schools and colleges, having the same circle of friends, will never be the same. Because no two people see exactly the same as the other, nor can they interpret that which they have seen in a like manner. No matter how close we are to another person, how linked our paths through life are, we are all different in some small way.

I am reminded of this idea of two people being so different – the one being creative, the other not – by close relations within my own family who, no matter what they experience in their daily lives, cannot find a way to describe that experience. They are unable to put down into words, in a daily journal, a letter, even something as open and accessible as a web log, what they have seen and what they make of it. They are incapable of expressing themselves privately too, having not seen that which could spur the inspiration. They cannot find the words to expand on a vision, to present it to others, to even present it back to themselves as a memory. And some of them react to this so-called failure – so-called because it is not a failure as such, unless a person wishes to build up a level of personal disappointment at themselves within themselves, but merely an ability that this one person does not have – by trying to bring down those who do. In his essay Of the disadvantage of greatness, Michel de Montaigne wrote:

Since we cannot attain it, let us take our revenge by speaking ill of it. Yet it is not absolutely speaking ill of something to find some defects in it; there are some in all things, however beautiful and desirable they may be.

He was, of course, writing about greatness itself, and how he both aspired, and did not aspire to it, how he suffered and:

I sharpen my courage toward endurance, I weaken it toward desire. I have as much to wish for as another, and I allow my wishes and inclinations as much freedom and indiscretion; yet it has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, or for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. I do not aim in that direction, I love myself too well.

Michel de Montaigne knew where his strengths and weaknesses lay, and clearly exploited his excellent mind in exploring those different aspects of his life where those strengths were to be found, rather than wishing the greatness of some other skilled artist upon himself. He goes on to give examples, in this fine essay, of those who sought one side or the other out, and were either disappointed in their aims, vilified by those who came later, or exemplified as good and bad examples of the human spirit. Rather than seeking to find where others gained their inspiration and, perhaps, to try and copy them, he went his own way, found his own calling and way through life. He writes, in the same essay, of Otanes, faced with a possible future of historical greatness upon the throne, who decided it better to abandon:

… to his competitors his chance of attaining it either by election or by lot, provided that he and his family might live in that empire free of all subjection and mastery save that of the ancient laws, and have every freedom that would not be prejudicial to these; balking at either commanding or being commanded.

Do we need to know where the inspiration comes from, where each artistic work has its beginning? Do we need to force a artist to release intimate details of their inner self, some of which they might not even understand themselves, to satisfy a passing whim for knowledge which, with our own skills and predilections, is useless to us? Better, I feel, to marvel at the wonders and the beauty, at the skill and mastery of a work, and be grateful for those skills, whatever they may be, that we have. And for those who try to dislodge an artist from their rightful and hard-earned status by breaking down the inspiration, the experience, the skill of production into something mundane and ordinary: beauty is in the eye of the beholder, if they are capable of looking and, above all, of seeing.