The Inspiration

WARNING! This is my first substantive post, and it’s long. I want to (and will) respond to classmates but because I’m still a bit behind and catching up I’m focusing on the questions/ subject matter for a while. I am reading it all, and really enjoying and appreciate the candor and insights.

I tend to agree with Thomas Edison, that genius is 99% perspiration, but that leaves the last 1% and it’s a doozy of a mystery. Virgil said that the Muses forced him to write poetry. Other artists say they hear voices in their heads when they create. Wherever inspiration comes from – Greek virgins in white gowns, the brain’s limbic system, the 4th dimension, psychosis – it’s mostly unfathomable, so I prefer to just trust how it feels, to submit to it. Octavio Paz said it more poetically (he being a poet): “Whatever name we give this voice – inspiration, the unconscious, chance, accident, revelation – it is always the voice of otherness.” The Fletcher book is a fabulous discovery, and I’m enjoying it immensely. Dare I say – inspiring. I love the “Eva” sculpture by Markus Raetz on page 169, and only partly because the piece shares a name with my first true love. I also had no idea there were artistic processes, not cheeses, known as grattage, frottage, froissage, and ecremage (pg. 155). Some of the more resonant quotes: “What is now proved was once only imagined” (Blake); “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves” (Orwell and I are kindred on this point); “All life feeds upon the random. Creativity is the haute cuisine.” (Hofstadter); and my personal favorite, by Andre Breton, “The man who can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.” So right. But the most profound statement, and the one that gives me the most hope, comes from Queen Victoria: “Beware of artists – they mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous.”

Having said all that, I do have some difficulty pinpointing those who MOST inspire me. No, a lot of difficulty. So I will list those who come to mind, in stream-of-consciousness fashion, without explanation or description. They all epitomize courage, brilliance, or audacity, and move me in some way, make me feel, activate action or passion: Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Sinatra, Van Morrison, New York Dolls, Bowie, Lou Reed, Springsteen, the Beatles, Mozart, Smokey Robinson, Elvis, Little Richard, James Brown, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Sly Stone, Robert Johnson; Kubrick, Woody Allen, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Sidney Lumet, Polanski, Scorsese, Milos Forman, “Harold and Maude,” “MASH,” “Fantasia,” “The Graduate,” “Chinatown,” “The Commitments,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Unforgiven,” “Modern Times,” “Help” and “Hard Day’s Night,” “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Annie Hall,” “Star Wars,” “Raging Bull,” “Bicycle Thief,” “Un Chien Andalou,” “Casablanca,” “Memento,” “Dr. Strangelove,” Peter Sellers, “The Year of Living Dangerously,” “Dead Poets’ Society,” “Rear Window,” “Clockwork Orange,” “Metropolis,” “Rashomon,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Glory,” “À Bout de Souffle,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Godfather,” Alan Watts, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Raoul Wallenberg, Orwell, Gandhi, Abe Lincoln (now there was an all-rounder), the Buddha, Bugs Bunny, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth (LOVE the Romantics), Michelangelo, Leonardo, Socrates, Robbie Conal, Robert Greenwald, Michael Moore, Rumi, Harriet Tubman, the Fab Four (Washington, Adams, Jefferson & Franklin), Thoreau, Emerson, Kahlil Gibran, Howard Zinn, Vonnegut, Shakespeare, Rodin, the Sumerians (invented the wheel, after all), Jung, Ayn Rand, Camus, Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Nabakov, Philip Roth, Salinger, Henry Miller, Gaugin, Monet (or was it Manet?), Sartre, Huxley, “Woodstock,” “Harlan County,” “Atomic Café,” “Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Don’t Look Back,” “Paris is Burning,” “Eyes on the Prize,” “Point of Order,” “Thin Blue Line,” “Hearts and Minds,” Night and Fog,” William Styron, Joan of Arc, Warhol, Dylan (Bob and Thomas), Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Aristotle, Edison, Darwin, Mel Brooks, Marlee Matlin, Debussy, Aaron Copland, Beethoven, “L.A. Story,” “Manhattan,” Michael Kinsley, James Galway, the Human Genome Project, Tim Berners-Lee, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris (“End of Faith”), Dr. Fred Alan Wolf of “What the Bleep” fame, Carl Sagan, Jon Stewart, political cartoonists (especially Ted Rall), Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, John Dean, Peter Max, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Kafka, Kay Redfield Jamison, the Marquis de Sade, Robin Williams, John Marshall, Martin Luther King, Van Gogh, Andrew Sullivan, Solzhenitsyn, “Schindler’s List,” the guy who invented the Segue, Dostoevsky, my (only) fave Conservatives -- George Will & Christopher Hitchins --, Richard Dawkins, The Doors, The Who, the Kinks, The Sex Pistols, the Constitution and the 1st Amendment.

Some recent inspirational discoveries:

1. I’m a huge fan of online advocacy communities for high school students. Some people I know created the following organization:

http://www.newglobalcitizens.org/home.html

2. If you ever wanted a glimpse into the incredible potential of information technology, check out this little lecture on T.E.D. Microsoft just released the software. Amazing . . .

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

3. An online community called KIVA allows individuals around the world to pool resources and make loans to entrepreneurial individuals in developing countries. My ‘client’ is Lidia Ramirez Lozano, from a small town in Peru:

http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=about&id=49369

4. TV commercials as art and advocacy . . . This may be one of the best examples I’ve ever seen. Almost Spielbergian. From India:

http://inspirationalvideos.net/