I find writing about abstract
nouns rather difficult. Why does inspiration occur? What is actual hatred? How
is my interpretation of beauty different from yours? …And so on. I was
struggling with what inspiration actually meant, but my dictionary helpfully
defined it as “the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel
something, esp. to do something creative”. This would probably explain why I
have never been “inspired” to do maths.
I don’t personally like the
idea of inspiration. It strikes me as too unbalanced, or unreliable; something
that has to be given. The Ancient
Greeks would invoke the muses for inspiration when telling the Homeric tales
for which their civilsation is renowned. They would say things like “tell me,
Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide”
or “anger – sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles” and whichever benevolently
divine being they believed was in charge of literature at the time would send
down a spark of inspiration that would allow them to feed their families for
another year.
To me, that isn’t inspiration.
It’s not something that can or can’t be given, but rather something that can or
can’t happen. Inspiration isn’t about an invocation to a pagan set of gods. It
is, instead, the feeling that I get before I run a race, where my heart is
beating a little too fast and I feel a bit like I’ve had too many shots of red
bull. It’s the night before a particularly important essay or piece of
coursework is due, and yet the laptop insists on restarting every half hour.
It’s the unrefined panic, the flashes in the dark, the pure and unadulterated
inconsistent seeking of a new edge on which for minds to sharpen themselves.
Authors and those involved in
the creative arts don’t invoke the muses anymore. At the front of books, I see
instead fragments like “For Phyllis, who made me put the dragons in” (Martin’s
Game of Thrones) and “For Daisy, who kicked out the walls of my
heart”(Donnelly’s Revolution). I think this shows that the human race has come
a long way from the Peloponnesian War and Odysseus’ journey home. It is other
people, not gods, who have become our inspiration for art in the forms of
literature, music and poetry. We have become able to see, through others, the
flashes in the dark that otherwise would not have existed without each other.
