On inspiration

I always resort to my muse for inspiration, but it is summer, and she is on vacation. “Work it out,” she said as she escaped out the back door on her way to the airport. She needed a vacation anyway. “Lately, I feel a little burned out, and this summer heat is really repressive. Scotland, if you want to know, but don’t call. I’ll come back when I’m ready.” And the door slammed shut.So, that’s where inspiration goes when you can’t find any. Inspiration has always been an elusive animal for me. I mean, I could sit and write about books or movies or accidents or terrorist attacks just as everyone does, but I would like to write that one really good essay on palimpsests or sub-atomic particles or death in Wordsworth’s poetry. The mundane clouds my imagination with shopping and garbage and lunches and television and a hundred other inconsequential matters to which no one will ever pay any attention. Nor should they. Inspiration is about creativity and originality and beauty and creating a prose that sores without breaking, a prose that enlightens without boring, a prose that elucidates the meaning of life without being either pedantic or soporific. Instead, all I can hear is the bang of that door as my muse flees the scene of the crime. New ideas? Who has new ideas? It isn’t easy to come up with a new idea every day. Inundated by the mundane noise of everyday existence, it is hard to see the beauty in a world that is often overwhelmed by violence, injustice, tragedy, and sadness. How does one see the beauty in the world through all the tears? If my muse would only come back, we might write about the beauty of concentric circles, of prisms and labyrinths, of rainbows and lightening, of starry nights and cool breezes, of rain and puddles and cool water. But it’s hot here and I’m out of ideas. Sweat runs down my neck, my head hurts a little, and I’m frustrated with myself. This urban setting is not particularly conducive to liberating new ideas, setting free the imagination, or dredging the sludge from the subconscious where lots of strange things reside. Maybe I should drink a glass of water? My chair could be more comfortable. Maybe I should write a new treatise on the insanity and violence of modern consumer societies where death is only another movie date away? Naw, not original or imaginative, not pretty, not aesthetic. Nightingales? No, that’s been done, but I could give it a new modern slant and use the nightingale as a metaphor for peace and justice and love–a small noisy bird of no consequence that goes unnoticed by the masses on their way to buy something new. My muse is a wonderful person, but she would think it hokey. Well, she’s gone and told me to work it out, so I’m going to write about nightingales.