five
INSPIRATION & CREATIVITY
The two Brontës, Emily and Charlotte—
where did they get their wildness? And
Tolstoy at times—how did he ever come at
the inwardness of being a prisoner on the
long French retreat from Moscow? ...
Where does the music come from that
composers hear in their inward ears?
MARY C. MORRISON
 
 
 
 
IS INSPIRATION, IS CREATIVITY ITSELF, an aspect of intuition? We know that inspiration, like intuition, strikes when you are relaxed and in a quiet, receptive mental state. Perhaps you’ve worked like a demon for days (and working flat-out is one of the requirements) until, exhausted, you give up. You drag yourself to bed. In sleep the answer comes, drifting up from the unconscious and handed to you like the apple in Eden. Isn’t this why writers and composers keep paper and pencil by their beds, knowing that inspiration strikes in that hazy half-sleeping state when your brain has access to your unconscious, the inner problem solver? Just as meditation offers peace and serenity, it also sharpens intuition. You sit down to meditate. Relax. Soften your tongue. Focus on your breath. You observe the thoughts that move like clouds across the sky of your awareness, drifting in and out, and sometimes, unaware, you discover yourself caught up in creative inspiration beyond your wildest dreams. You don’t need to sit cross-legged before an altar like a monk, though that practice is not to be sneezed at. Your meditation may consist of a walk in the woods, the steady raking of autumn leaves, trimming the hedges—anything that pulls you away from your immediate problems, puts you outdoors, and allows the mind to relax. There’s a reason Buddhists call meditation the “wish-fulfilling tree.” Your dreams come true as you practice meditating.
I’ve never invented anything, but once while meditating at a Vipassana Buddhist retreat (they don’t call it “insight meditation” for nothing), I “saw” the way a table is composed of atoms and the way the atoms danced. But how could I “see” an effect that can’t even be viewed under a microscope?
The insight was not new. The Greek philosopher and geometer Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC) proposed the existence of an ultimate particle that he called atomos. Indeed, the idea goes back even further, to his teacher Leucippus. Aristotle disdained the idea, but by the first century BC the theory of atoms was so widely accepted that Roman writer Lucretius mentioned atoms in his two-hundred-page poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), in which he spoke of “assemblies” of very small building blocks that collided and fell apart as they formed the material world.
... no respite’s ever given
To atoms through the fathomless void but, rather, they are driven
By sundry restless motions. After colliding, some will leap
Great intervals apart, while others harried by blows will keep
In a narrow space. Those atoms that are bound together tight,
When they collide with something, their recoil is only slight
Since they are tangled up in their own intricate formation:
Such are the particles that form the sturdy roots of stone,
And make up savage iron and other substances of this kind.
Lucretius was an Epicurean philosopher who believed that things are exactly what they seem to be: Our senses don’t deceive us. Had Lucretius viewed this phenomenon himself by inspiration, insight, or clairvoyance? Had he seen it while in meditation?
Perhaps a more striking example of psychic inspiration is the case of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, the British theosophists who described in their 1908 book, Occult Chemistry, a clairvoyant vision of the internal structure of atoms, including a new form of the element neon, which they called a meta-neon, and claimed it to have an atomic weight of 22.33. Francis Aston, then a physics assistant to Sir J. J. Thomson at Cambridge University in England (the man who identified the electron in the atom), had read Occult Chemistry before discovering in 1912, while analyzing neon gas, a substance with that same atomic weight of 22.33. His discovery became a key to the development of the atomic bomb. In 1922 Aston received the Nobel Prize, and such is the distaste of scientists for psychic phenomena and intuition that curiously he neglected to credit in his acceptance speech the inspiration of theosophist clairvoyance.
Creative people report more psychic experiences, see farther into the depths of the world, than other people do.
But what exactly is inspiring us? Is it simply our unconscious mind awakening and spewing out information lodged in forgotten memories or making connections we hadn’t recognized before? The verb inspire derives from the Latin word meaning “to breathe in.” Subtly enfolded in its essence is the sense that something is breathing into us, as God breathed into the clay of Adam to fill him with life.
Some people—Dante, Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, and hosts of modern artists—demonstrate extraordinary creativity. Likewise scientists, inventors, engineers, mathematicians, cooks. According to the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy C. Andreasen, in her book The Creative Brain: the Science of Genius, the brains of such giants differ qualitatively from those of ordinary people. Their thought and neural processes are different, she says (though how she would know, since they’re dead, remains a mystery). What is interesting is that creative people seem to listen in the same way that people with psychic abilities do.
“I slip into a state,” writes the playwright Neil Simon, “that is apart from reality.... I don’t write consciously—it is as if the muse sits on my shoulder.”
The same thing happens when you move into the intuitive mind, the state where the paranormal may also come into play. You go into a slightly altered state. You turn off the churning thoughts of everyday banking and bruising. You allow yourself to be still. Listening. Often this mindless state is achieved by quiet, repetitive motions: taking a walk, knitting, cleaning, cooking, ironing, weeding the garden, repairing the roof, sanding your boat. Slowly you enter the restful quietude of “no-mind.” Often a rocking sensation helps, as when traveling in a train or bus, in which the gentle soothing motion somehow swings you into that receptive childlike part of the brain, where you can be taken over by your Higher Self.
“When I am, as it were, completely in myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer,” wrote Mozart, “say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them ... Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell!”
Sometimes you are given no more than a fragment of the work before the Muse, distracted, turns away, the spigot shuts off, and then, using your own small, pitiful, human resources, you wrestle with the work, tussling and struggling to beat the material into shape; or else you strain to hear the distant echoes of inspiration, like fairy bells, too faint for even the most sensitive ear. The creative process is different from conscious analytic thought. Ideas collide in a dreamlike state or else rise up like bubbles in that hypnagogic state you occupy just as you are drifting into sleep.
Here is Tchaikovsky, speaking of his musical inspiration.
Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soul is ready—that is to say, if the disposition for work is there—it takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches, leaves, and finally, blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any other way. . . .
In the summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel composed his famous oratorio Messiah in a single burst of exalted inspiration. It took twenty-seven days, less than a month, and the music carried him to heights of ecstasy. One day his assistant found the composer with tears running down his cheeks. Handel held up the score to the “Hallelujah Chorus”: “I think I have seen the face of God,” he said.
Artists, writers, and musicians are not the only people who are struck by inspiration. Was this the state of Archimedes when he solved the problem of how to determine whether an irregularly shaped crown was made of alloy or of gold? He was still puzzling over the question when, stepping into his bath, he noticed the water level rise and understood in a flash of inspiration that the volume of water displaced was equal to the volume of that portion of his body in the water. Thus he could calculate with precision the volume of an irregular object. He was so excited that he leaped from the tub and ran naked down the streets of Syracuse, shouting Eureka! Which translates roughly as “I’ve got it!”
But where did it come from, his bolt from the blue? It is an axiom that solutions present themselves only after hard, grinding work followed by release. I know one mathematician who in the act of lovemaking suddenly stopped (“Wait! Wait!”), reached for his pen, and began to scribble down the solution that his subconscious mind presented at that moment of climactic exuberance. It’s in the restful state, usually, however, as you drop off to sleep, or soak in a bath, or take a walk, that answers float unbidden to the surface of your consciousness. Inspiration. Handed you by God.
011
If automatic writing appears under the flag of the unleashed subconscious, actualizing itself outside volition . . . , it also proclaims the poet’s innocent wish to force inspiration.
ODYSSEUS ELYTIS, Nobel laureate
PARACELSUS WAS A PHYSICIAN and alchemist who applied his knowledge of chemistry to the healing arts. He wrote dozens of scientific works, including Der Grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) and made groundbreaking advances in treating disease and wounds. He died in 1541 at the age of forty-eight, wealthy and renowned. “That which the dream shows,” he wrote, “is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it.... We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourselves.”
Which mathematician was it (do you know?) whose wife would dream of mathematical solutions? I heard that her husband kept paper and pencil by his bedside so that when his wife awoke he could write down what she’d seen, for she knew nothing about mathematics or the meaning of what she dreamed.
Another example of the creativity of dreams came in the late nineteenth century, when the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz dreamed he saw a snake eating its own tail, which gave the appearance of a large ring. At the time von Stradonitz was engaged in research on the six carbon atoms in the molecule of benzene, which he envisioned as a straight line. On waking from his dream he realized that in fact they form a ring. His discovery is regarded as one of the greatest flashes of creative genius in the entire field of organic chemistry.
Intuition or not, however, the recipient must be not only aware and awake but also ready to receive. Nothing will persuade me that the author of those poems and plays, the man who gave us such women as Portia, Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Gertrude, Ophelia, Desdemona, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan; a man who clearly had traveled widely, read copiously, and was conversant with the Bible, royal politics, aristocratic ways, the culture of the court, and the history and literature of his time; a man who, at a minimum, spoke English and French (but likely also Latin, Italian, Greek, and a smattering of other languages), was a commoner, the father of two illiterate daughters; a man whose will mentions no writings or plays and no books (expensive, leather-bound), whose tomb was dignified with a self-penned piece of pathetic doggerel, and whose neighbors were unaware of his having composed immortal plays. Even if Creativity is the handmaid of Intuition, even if angels are dictating from some Higher Dimension, the vessel or conduit for this work (the artist) must have the vocabulary and experience to transcribe what he hears. Mozart was the son of a musician, as were the sons of Johann Sebastian Bach, and Bach himself, and Beethoven and Mendelssohn. True, Schubert was the son of Moravian peasants, but he had intense musical training beginning at the age of five. The creative artist does not work in a vacuum of intuitive genius; he is grounded in the craft. His duty is to get so fine an education, to be so versed in the chosen science or craft in which he works, that Intuition and Inspiration may plant their foothold in his heart.
 
THE WRITER C. M. MAYO told me that once when writing her novel The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire she came to a section and was utterly blocked. She couldn’t write. One character eluded her, and she couldn’t proceed until she found the clue to his nature. Finally, in desperation, she called a psychic, an intuitive or “sensitive,” who went into a slightly altered state and began to speak about the fictional character of her historical novel. She gave Catherine a visual image for him that bumped her back into writing.
Where do the thoughts come from that invade my mind? It’s so mysterious. Every writer knows this sensation of not being completely in control. The way a character comes knocking at the doors of consciousness, stalks into the living room, and settles by the fire without a by-your-leave, insists on smoking against your will (what is a cheroot anyway?), knocking the ashes on your rug until you’re finally forced to stop your plans for the book and give him your attention. Perhaps he’s only a minor character, but you both know (he strutting and arrogant, and you by now resigned) that now he’s going to steal each scene.
012
He who is born in imagination discovers the latent forces of
Nature. ... Besides the stars that are established, there is
yet another—Imagination—that begets a new star and a
new heaven.
PARACELSUS
I know another writer who sometimes sets down a word she doesn’t even know. Where did that word come from? she thinks as she lurches to the dictionary, only to find that it carries exactly the connotation she wants. She laughs that she has a scholar guide who helps her even when she doesn’t think to ask. He has a better vocabulary than she.
But what artist hasn’t had such experiences? I remember puttering along on one “omniscient author” novel when suddenly a first-person narrator popped up, bringing me to a full stop. For months I could not proceed. He refused to move off, and I refused to let him in. Finally, defeated, I decided to plow ahead, to trust: I could always go back later (I consoled myself) and remove him from the book, and since I couldn’t write without him, I might as well see what he had to say. Throughout, he surprised me with his unanticipated twists. When I came to the end of the book I realized the novel was far better for being told by him. But where had he come from? Inspiration? Our Higher Selves, our guides and angels, know far more than we.

THE EXTERNAL VOICE

Occasionally this inspiration is so strong, it comes as an External Voice. The phenomenon is so commonplace that it appears in literature around the world. In his short story “Old-fashioned Farmers,” Nikolai Gogol wrote: “It has doubtless happened to you, at some time or other, to hear a voice calling you by name.” The narrator adds that he has heard the voice many times in his childhood. “I confess...” he continues, “that it was very terrifying to me,” frightening because the Russian peasants believed an external voice to be the man’s spirit longing for him and calling him to death. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, when Jane is about to go to India with St. John Rivers, she hears Rochester calling her name aloud, and so clear is it that she refuses River and travels back to Thornfield Hall and the man she loves.
I heard of a National Geographic photographer who wanted his work published. Walking one day in Hawaii, dejected and forlorn, he heard a voice speak to him aloud: “Go see XYZ.”
He looked around, surprised. Where had that voice come from? He didn’t know the man the voice suggested, indeed had never heard the name before. He went home and asked his sister if she’d ever heard of anyone with that name. She did. That man became his publisher.
Joan of Arc heard voices, and mystics sometimes attest to the external direction. It’s called clairaudience.
One day Saint Augustine (not yet a saint) was praying in his garden. At the time he was filled with doubt and self-loathing. He twisted in the chains of his despair, unable to dedicate himself to God and to the life of chastity that he felt the move required, and yet unable to continue living lustily as before. He threw himself on the ground, tears streaming down his face, then heard a child’s voice: “Sume, lege!” it called. “Pick it up. Read!” He reached for the book beside him, which happened to be the Epistles of Saint Paul, read the first words his eyes fell on, and in one instant was converted in an excess of grace and joy. He had no difficulty giving up his mistress, for suddenly he burned heart and soul for God.
Usually the Voice has lesser things to say. One time when I was in Italy, I was on my way to meet friends in Lucca, but I had managed to catch the wrong train and ended up late at night in the wrong town. Unable to call my friends (this was before cell phones), I checked into the railroad station hotel and fell into exhausted sleep, only to be woken the next morning by my mother calling me by my nickname: “Penny! Penny! Wake up! Hurry! You have to hurry!” I scrambled up. My mother had been dead for years, but I never doubted it was she. I threw on clothes, grabbed a taxi to Lucca, and found my friends about to leave for the weekend. They’d given up on me.
Not long ago I was talking to a State Department officer who told me that after his mother died she had woken him up on several occasions, always with her own voice pulling him out of sleep. Once she told him to put iodine on his bad case of poison ivy. It worked.
Years ago I received a letter from a woman in New Jersey who wrote of how, soon after she had first married, her husband left her for his girlfriend. She was devastated, weeping, broken-hearted, when she heard “the most peaceful, calming voice coming from one corner of the room. ‘Don’t worry,’ it said, ‘things will be better.’”
She saw no one, yet she could not deny the words she had heard. “I fell asleep almost immediately,” she wrote, “and when I woke up I had a totally different outlook and was able to make my decision to divorce, move on.... But I will never forget that voice. I can still recall it today.”
Sometimes the External Voice comes with music. Jody’s mother was Jody’s closest friend. As her mother was dying, Jody lay on the bed beside her, stroking her mother, telling her how beautiful she was and how much she loved her. Then her mother died. At first Jody was afraid to be in the house alone. Some two weeks after her mother’s death, she was still sleeping on the living room couch, too afraid to enter her bedroom, where her mother had died. One night she was awakened by the most beautiful sound, she says, that she has ever heard. She could only describe it as angelic! It sounded like her mother’s voice but younger. It wasn’t singing a melody but rather a sequence of “lala-la.” She sat up. She even pinched herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. The singing lasted for about three minutes, then stopped. She lay down and slept immediately. The next morning she felt such utter peace that all fears and grief had gone. She took the singing as a sign from her mother that she was all right, happy, in a better place.
“I wish I could hear it again,” she wrote. “It was the most peaceful, calming, beautiful sound in the world—or rather not in this world.”
I’m struck by how two different women, writing in different years and of two different experiences, used the same wording to describe “the most peaceful, calming, beautiful voice.”
Judith Watkins Tartt is a paintings conservator. One evening her friend Michael said offhandedly, “If you haven’t gone to Asia by the age of thirty-five, you haven’t lived.” The next morning she left her Connecticut Avenue studio to get a cup of coffee across the street. As she entered the coffee shop she saw a small Chinese man carrying a bag marked with the logo of the International Institute for Conservation, which had concluded its annual convention the day before. At her ear she heard a loud voice: Speak to him! She was so startled she turned to see who was behind her.
She obeyed. “Why are you still here?” was all she could think of to say. (She never spoke to strangers.)
“First time in America, I come to visit all conservation studios.” He produced a list.
“Well, I’m a conservator,” she said. “You can see my studio. It’s just across the street.” His name was Bobby Ng, and it turned out he was the chief conservator and museum developer of the Hong Kong Museum of Art. That evening after he had toured the National Gallery, the Freer, the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Phillips, he arrived at her studio. She happened to have some pretty impressive paintings awaiting treatment, including a Fantin-Latour and a David Park.
They ate dinner that night at the nearby Chinese restaurant, and then she invited him to drive out to Virginia with her. “You can’t leave America without seeing the countryside,” she said. He wanted to go to a pistol-shooting range, where Judith, who had never held a gun in her hands, took aim and smashed the bull’s-eye. He was thrilled. By the time he finished his dinner at the Red Fox Inn in Middleburg, he’d invited her to Hong Kong to do the conservation work on the fabulous collection of China Trade paintings at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
And all because she’d heard a voice. Is that the same as intuition?