The Pits of Inspiration
By Duncan Stuart
To write one must be inspired. One must be in the grip of an idea, have had a vision of something that must be brought into the world by one’s own hand. This idea and the inspiration for it, rise and fall on the winds, come tumbling out of the sky, or even worse, well up out of the ground. It can strike at any time, or leave the writer without warning, cruelly and suddenly abandoning our artist to mere mediocrity.
Etymologically the word inspire comes from the Latin to breathe into, specifically to breathe life into something. The jolt of inspiration then, is when the force of life, of animation, takes hold of an idea. Then the idea, and often the writer, are taken over by a strange energy, propelled back to the writing desk where the idea is transferred from the mind to the paper via the hand and eventually into the mind of you, the reader, via either your own eyes or someone reading these vital words to you.
From the moment the idea becomes inspired and gains life – via conversation, on a lengthy constitutional, in front of the great works of the old masters – it is then a single predetermined arc that carries the artist into the beautiful well-formed piece that readers eagerly consume, sharing and liking and distributing.
In this most perfect image of inspiration, we hit the other meaning of the term, which as far as I know, developed in the Middle Ages. Inspiration as divinity. When the idea hits, it is unclear where it came from. So, it must have come from – who else? - God. Indeed, apparently ye old definition of inspiration from circa 1300 means “the immediate influence of God or a god.” Immediate influence means its directly influenced by God himself.
God, whatever your denomination, is so often a creator, a maker. So, in a sense all inspiration takes part of God. At least for those of us who are readers of the Bible, God also literally inspires the world around us, breathing life into the animals, plants and Adam and Eve themselves. In this Christian analogy, God creates the world, and thus the first creative act is, indeed, a divine one.
These two poles - the single arc of the creative process, and inspiration and creativity as divine -define our dominant metaphors of inspiration. Inspiration is the process by which I begin building the house of the artwork. In building such a house I partake of some kind of cosmic or divine moment. It’s Henry James, who in his preface to A Portrait of a Lady, describes fiction as a house in which there are a million windows. Then Gerald Murnane, one hundred years later, transforms his own oeuvre into a mansion in which his narrators all live, bickering and arguing, in the aptly named novel A Million Windows. A fictional text about Murnane’s own house of fiction? How inspired. In this view inspiration is the first step in any construction, and writing is a building process: brick by brick, word by word the magnificent multi-storeyed mansion of fiction grandly comes together.
I, however, think this story about inspiration is total bullshit. Here’s what happens whenever I have an idea, whenever I am inspired: as the electric current of what appears to be a decent idea flows through me, I rush towards my writing desk, however far it may be; perhaps, on the train home, or isolated from my toolbox of fiction, I access the notes app on my phone and type, or pull my notebook from my pocket like its 1963 and scribble away in my childlike handwriting; whenever I reach the mechanical part of the process, whatever that may be, I furiously write or type or scribble; and then, somewhere between 50 and 300 words later, I give up. I simply cannot write anymore. My wonderful divinely inspired idea becomes exhausted; God has abandoned me. With the well run dry off I go to waste time again, in front of the T.V. for five hours, or at the bar for the next six.
In On The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche says that the human is the animal who is free to make promises. This is a kind of paradoxical situation. The human is a creature so free that they are free to reduce their own freedom. Nietzsche identifies this as a problem, but luckily (or so we are told) this problem has largely been solved by forgetfulness. For Nietzsche, forgetting is a virtue, without which there can be “no joy, no hope, no pride, no real present.” As early as On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche is committed to articulating a vision of human life and wellbeing organised around two poles. The first is centring the creative and artistic process as a guide to living well, the second is the importance of forgetting. In order to have a relationship with the present, to create culture that rises to the challenges of the contemporary – whether Nietzsche’s or our own (perhaps these are the same) – we must have an active practice of forgetting. In On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life Nietzsche goes so far as to argue for an approach to history that is actively forgetful, that takes what is useful and leaves behind what is not. In this elaborate Nietzschean conception, creation and forgetting are bound at the hip.
This troubles our metaphor of artistic process as a process of construction. What happens to me when I hit that 300-word point, when the arc of inspiration fizzles out? I am no longer laying the groundwork of some great house, nay mansion, of literature. I have been reduced to a much lowlier position. I am in the foundation pit, digging through the dirt, trying to find some golden token, some glint of what I’ve lost. I dig and dig, and eventually, having tried different digging tools and different spots, I find something in the dirt. This might be a miniature of what I had hoped to create. More often than not, however, it is something else entirely. Sometimes I emerge from the pit, dirt crusted underneath my uncut nails, exhausted and sweating, and I simply give up. Other times, on the verge of giving up I turn to one of the other many sad souls in the pit who is also shifting through the earth and ask them for advice. One of these sad souls might helpfully suggest I try looking in some far-flung corner of the pit. Dragging myself there, I dig relentlessly, only to find something far less valuable. Good enough I think, and much thanks due to my fellow pit dwellers.
Now I hear you dear reader, crying out that the foundation pit I am trapped in is the first part of building our great house of literature, or fiction, or criticism, or whatever. You are growing red, tiring yourself out, telling me and my fellow pit dwellers that it’s a long process but a worthwhile one. True, true, we reply in unison. Yet this is no ordinary pit. Have you, I yell back, read Andrey Platonov? You shout back “what” before nearly tumbling into the pit, and after this brush with deathly embarrassment you retreat from the edge, out of my line of sight, away from the range of my voice.
In Andrey Platonov’s masterful novel The Foundation Pit, he describes, in prose ideological and surreal, a great construction process. Our hero Voschev, recently fired for thinking too much, wanders in search of work. He finds a job helping to build a great foundation pit, a rather obvious metaphor for building socialism. By the end of the book, very little construction has happened, but the workers are fighting, people are dying and Nastya, a child and metaphor for the hopes of communist Russia, is buried in the foundation pit after she dies from a cold.
This metaphor of the foundation pit that will never be built, where new depths are dug and hopes and dreams are lost and laid to rest is a pretty good metaphor for Stalinist Russia. It’s a better one for the writing process. In The Foundation Pit characters forget, again and again, what they are doing and why. I’ve started on my house of fiction, or criticism, or whatever. Inspiration has griped me and before I can lay the first stone, I’ve forgotten why I am here at all. I know I have to salvage the situation and so I start digging, hoping there is some treasure, or least something impressive, probably someone else’s, buried somewhere here.
As the workers and diggers of The Foundation Pit wander around their site, confused and forgetting the meaning of communism, I too am trying to recover something I once knew, trying to rekindle that spark of inspiration that fizzled out so fast. Where has it gone, and father--why have you forsaken me? Then again, whoever said God speaks to you in your native language?
Duncan Stuart is an Australian writer living in NYC. His work has appeared in The Cleveland Review of Books, Overland, Minor Literatures, and elsewhere.