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Some notes on the experiences of “truth” and “inspiration” [updated 08/21/2004]

In art the experience of encountering the truth is often like an unveiling. Layers of shallow and false consciousness that surround the truth fall away. Interestingly, the word aesthetics derives from the idea of the sensuous apprehension of the truth, the divine, or beauty. You know when this aesthetic experience is happening because during the creation process you feel like there is an encounter with something new to or even other than your self. Or you may connect with a facet of your self that is closer to your core values, your true self, the roots of your identity. When you are writing in this way, you feel in a very tangible way who you essentially are.

When art comes from a more profound place and when art appeals to the senses, it has an immediate power for its creator as well as for its audience. The experience of seeing and actually feeling the truth etc. in something is especially potent if one has trained one’s eye and ear to understand the art. It reconnects the individuals in the audience to a deeper sense of who and what they are just as it does for the artist. That is why art can have quasi moral-spiritual-cultural values that bind people together in a society.

You can get to the deeper levels of the art in many ways. In writing, the initial resources are memory and imagination. Another powerful resource is your intuition, which could be taken as simply the ability to sense gut-level truths about life situations. Or intuition could be taken, in its much older sense, as the immediate apprehension of the divine, i.e. having visions of angels or other incarnations of the truth. Memory, imagination and intuition may all be involved in your writing process. Most poets and writers rely heavily on one of these for inspiration.

What is inspiration? In the most Romantic sense, it could be the moment when, like William Blake, you have an actual vision of angels or when the spirit of a great dead poet like John Milton confesses to you that he got it all wrong. Inspiration in this form is extraordinarily rare and, actually, catastrophic for many of the “inspired.” Blake suffered much due to being looked upon as an eccentric and possible lunatic.

In a more pedestrian form, inspiration could be the moment when you remember a scene of great beauty or significance. William Wordsworth had something like this in mind when he wrote that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility.” Memories, especially those encoded in previous writings in many little notebooks, inspired his imagination to a far greater vision than most contemporary poets even dream about now. One key to his success was that he often waited until he had enough distance from his theme to reflect upon even tragic events with serenity.

Inspiration can also come in the form of a voice, an auditory “presence” that can seem uncanny and even “other” than oneself. Starting with ancient Greek drama, there has been a long tradition of poets being “divinely inspired” and projecting the voices of great mythic figures like Aeschylus’ Cassandra and Clytemnestra in The Oresteia. Dramatic poetry, broadly taken as poetry in the voices of different personae, is still a rich and powerful tradition in English, European and American poetry. It can be traced through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gwendolyn Brooks, et alia. Following “a voice” or inventing a persona in poetry can be a very liberating (and/or traumatic) experience because you can say things through a persona that you did not know that you knew. A persona could be an ally like an altar ego, or a persona could be an antagonist, or an authority figure’s voice, and much else. Even if you never thought of writing in a persona, it is a way to free your imagination from the things you are used to and, perhaps, tired of in your own repertoire. A persona is also a way to outsmart your own internal censors, the parts of the self that prevent you from sharing your total consciousness of the world. A persona can often say things that you would not dare to say yourself but which you honestly need to say.

In a more flat-footed way, inspiration can just feel like pressure, urgency, a need to get something out by a deadline. This is how it is for most writers most of the time, and there is nothing with it. It could just be an interesting theme that draws you along like a magnet and will not let you go. Inspiration for some writers even feels like a nagging experience. This is okay as long as the nagging gets you to go somewhere worthwhile.

Inspiration also appears, very concretely, in the form of an understanding audience, a sympathetic reader, a literary friend. Writers need to gain confidence in their words, to know that they will resonate meaningfully for others. Nothing makes a writer stronger more quickly than a reader who actually understands what the writer is really doing and, even better, what the writer could potentially do. Writers also learn the most readily from peers at or near their own level. Your friends in the writing world help you to go beyond your old limitations. They challenge and inspire you. They are hungry for the best that you can do, and when you do hit the deeper veins of the truth, they are the first to confirm for you that you did it.

In the end, it does not matter how you get inspired. What matters is what you write!