A DIVINE MADNESS

posted by James Reel

    For some reason, this week I haven’t been inspired to blog. What better time to dig into my archives and retrieve an essay I wrote about 10 years ago for a literary e-zine on the subject of inspiration?

LET ME SAVE YOU A FEW THOUSAND BUCKS and several years wasted in some MFA program. Here's how you become a writer: First, learn the basics of spelling, grammar and punctuation; second, sit down and await inspiration.
    That, at least, has been a popular notion of the writing process. Inspiration is the key, and its nature has been argued since the time of Plato. What people have overlooked during these past two milennia is that the mechanism of inspiration, if important to writers, is even more essential to good readers.
    Literary inspiration has always been held suspect, even though craft alone has been thought inadequate for the task of writing. Critics have argued the details at length, but many agree that the creative act seems not to be an entirely rational act. Indeed, "inspired" writing has long been considered a form of madness; a writer surrenders to a source other than rational thought and becomes possessed by ideas. Some critics call this madness divine; others dismiss it as specious, merely a mild psychological aberration. Whichever position may prevail at the moment, it always stands to reason that "irrational" writing demands an equally "irrational" response from the reader.
    According to Hesiod, ancient Greek practitioners of the various arts took their inspiration from specific Muses. Calliope, for example, was the Muse of heroic or epic poetry; Erato held sway over lyric and love poetry; Polymnia oversaw sacred poetry; Melpomene stood as the Muse of tragedy, while Thalia yukked it up in the field of comedy. Their mother was Mnemosyne, or Memory.
    These weren't good elves who slid down a moonbeam and did the poet's work for him overnight. They were spirits who took possession of the artist, and if there were no exorcist nearby, the poor poet would start spitting up dactylic hexameter.
    Plato, who never trusted them anyway, thought poets must be psychotic. He branded inspiration as such in the course of listing mental abnormalities in the Phaedrus: "There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry, glorifying the countless mighty deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity."
    And, again, in his swan song, the Laws (Book 4): "(When) a poet takes his seat on the Muse's tripod, his judgment takes leave of him. He is like a fountain which gives free course to the rush of its waters."
    Still, Plato considered inspiration to be essential to good poetry. Again, the Phaedrus: "But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found."
    Thomas Hobbes did his cantankerous best to belittle the role of inspiration, in his Answer to Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650): "I can imagine no cause but a reasonless imitation of custom, of a foolish custom, by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a bagpipe."
    Yet Hobbes recognized the place for inspiration, or "Fancy," in a genealogy of creativity: "Time and education begets experience; experience begets memory; memory begets Judgment and Fancy: Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a poem."
    A first-century thinker known to us only as Pseudo-Longinus had already made this argument in On the Sublime: Poetic inspiration is not dangerous, as Plato maintained, but the generator of worthy, if raw, material that needs to be refined through the art of rhetoric. Rhetorical devices may be learned, Pseudo-Longinus maintained, but sublimity is inherent, the "echo of a great soul." Inspiration or sublimity is the rare thing, but it counts for little if not subjected to knowing craftsmanship.
    Poet Paul Valéry could have been picking up this very concept 18 centuries later, when he observed in Poetry and Abstract Thought (1939): "Well, every time I have worked as a poet, I have noticed that my work exacted of me not only that presence of the poetic universe..., but many reflections, decisions, choices, and combinations, without which all possible gifts of the Muses, or of Chance, would have remained like precious materials in a workshop without an architect."
    Percy Bysshe Shelley, the ultimate Romantic, naturally found inspiration to be a marvelous thing, but he would have none of this "gifts of the Muses" business. In his 1821 Defense of Poetry, he offered an interesting twist on Plato's conception of inspiration as a product of divine afflatus. According to Shelley, divinity does not drop in on the poet from some other realm; divinity seems to reside within the poet:
    "A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed..."
    Shelley is a bit inconsistent; just what is the source of that "inconstant wind," which he implies is internal? If not divine afflatus, perhaps divine flatulence?
    Carl Jung, as if putting a Shelleyan twist on Plato, found inspiration to be a sort of possession by the darker forces of one's own mind. Jung's On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry (1922) distinguishes between art that is strictly regulated by the artist's conscious decisions ("introverted" art) and art that springs from the unconscious, bypassing deliberate control ("extraverted" art).
    In the first type, "the poet appears to be the creative process itself, and to create of his own free will without the slightest feeling of compulsion." In the second type, the artist is almost a victim of the collective unconscious and its army of archetypes:
    "The unborn work in the psyche of (this) artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. ... We would do well, therefore, to think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex. It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness."
    This latter, "extraverted" category of artist is the one who feels possessed, and who often produces works characterized by "a strangeness of form and content, thoughts that can only be apprehended intuitively, a language pregnant with meanings..." In other words, works that seem rather mad—the unrefined sublimity of automatic writing.
    Pioneer psychologist William James, who really had the soul of a novelist, had his little flings with automatic writing under the influence of hallucinogens. But his brother Henry, the novelist who thought like a psychologist, took a far more practical view of inspiration. Henry James famously admonished young novelists to write from experience—and not let any details of experience slip by one's observation. A carefully contemplated experience, even something so fleeting as pausing before an open door on an apartment stairway to glimpse an unfamiliar family at dinner, could be elaborated and shaped into an entire novel.
    We come down to the contention that writing, however "inspired," is a process of perception and synthesis. And so, necessarily, is reading.
    Consider two dictionary definitions of inspiration: "1. a divine influence or action on a person believed to qualify him or her to receive and communicate sacred revelation. 2. the act of drawing in; specif. the drawing of air into the lungs." What is reading, if not an act of drawing language into the mind? And don't most writers secretly regard themselves as communicating "sacred revelation" to their readers?
    A good reader becomes possessed by an effective writer. Characters, themes, even patterns of language find life within the reader, who attempts to suspend disbelief but constantly checks the written word against real experience and past readings, and then finds his or her prejudices challenged, fears confirmed, desires teased, imagination stimulated.
    The sterner creative writing faculties may reduce writing to a matter of observation and craft, but reading remains a pursuit of the truly inspired.