The Emotional Pumpkin

感情的な南瓜

Friday, May 20, 2005

While we're on the subject,

I've been thinking lately about the mechanics of inspiration. More specifically, the mechanics of my inspiration, since it is, of course, a highly individualized experience. I'll focus on poetry here, although I think this should apply to prose as well; I tend to write more poetry because, well, I'm better at it than prose, and because poetry is like instant gratification to the writer. It's quickly done and edited, quicker for the reality to match the vision, if that makes any sense.

Anyway, back in the day, I used to think of a topic I was inspired by and write on it—pretty straightforward, sure—but more often than not that came out as rambling, melodramatic drivel (you have noticed my tendency toward melodrama?). Of course sometimes I came up with something I really liked, but my yield was pretty low. And, engineer that I am, I am constantly dissecting and studying the anatomy of my ideas to see if I can more efficiently harness my creativity (is that even possible?).

Looking back over what I've written, I've noticed that the stuff I like best is more or less the stuff that was produced under pressure. Something written with a specific goal or parameters in mind. Let me explain: as an example, let's look at one of the exercises I did in a creative writing class I took in high school. I was to use the following words in a poem: finger, voice, mother, needle, cloud. Moreover, I was to take a proverb and paraphrase it somewhere in the poem. Here's what I came up with:

The Ghost Ship

Black cliffs rise, stern and forbidding,
through the reaching fingers of the mist
Echoes of voices
voices of the disappeared
lost in the clouds of memory
Their mothers sit quietly in the howling wind,
mending with needle and thread the tatters of lost souls
The ghost ship passes by in dead silence,
its passengers screaming soundlessly
The sea is the death of a thousand loves.


Now, call me arrogant, but I was very happy with that result. The same is true of the love poems I mentioned earlier. In fact, the last 5 or 6 poems I've written have been done with that sort of under-pressure writing style, and I've been happy with all of them (and if you'd seen some of my earlier stuff, you'd know that is pretty rare). What I've been doing is this, and it sort of came about naturally. I'd find myself somewhere, maybe driving down the highway late at night, listening to music, and suddenly a word, or a phrase, or a stanza would pop fully-formed into my head, and I'd rush home (or wherever) and write it down. More often than not it'd be a line or a collection of words I thought sounded particularly, for lack of a better word, poetic. But, and this is the most important part, it had no context. It would just be something evocative of an emotion I wanted to capture, or a pleasing combination of sounds. Also more often than not, I had no larger purpose for this phrase.

And so I started amassing this collection of rootless words. Eventually, I compiled a file of them, and occasionally I'll come back and look it over. Then, like scrabble tiles, I'll pick some of them, rearrange them this way and that, maybe add some connective tissue, and presto! I'll have a poem. Here's one like that:

suddenly incomplete

awoken by
the temporary grace
of a breath of your skin
as you passed by on the street

I didn't know you
but you were all that I dream of
in the dreams that
come morning
I can only remember
as impressions of color and emotion

you were not real
in the way that children
are seeds of people
who do not exist, yet
you were the promise of meaning
and the suggestion of joy

you moved too fast
for my mortal eyes to see
leaving only brilliant,
fading afterimages
photo-flashes of vivid life
in a monochrome existence

I was left blinking,
confused
my eyes trying to readjust
to the dimness
of my everyday world

made slack-jawed and slow-witted
by the blinding vision
of unfulfilled possibility
I stood still, there
making small ripples
in the river of people
that flowed around me

I was stunned by
whispers of what-ifs
given a glimpse of the realization
of a wish I didn’t know I had

and all of a sudden
I was unfinished
made somehow less
than I had been
a moment before

I had not missed
what I had not known
what you had just shown me

and I didn’t know which was worse
the loss
or the never-having

and now
when it is all
nothing but a memory
that has not faded
I am still amazed
that something so little
isn’t.


It was built around the phrases "temporary grace" and "children are the seeds of people...". Pretty cool, huh? I find it unbelievable that I could do something that...random, and have the result be something I like. Here's a snippet of an unfinished poem, another one of those collections of rootless words:

light splatters across my room
like a paint spill
an accidental luminosity
a fortuitous geometry
of moon and star and window-pane


That's the beginning of a poem that's been almost-finished for months now. I'm just missing the connective tissue between a couple of the stanzas. Maybe one of these days I'll get another phrase and boom, it'll be done.

What inspires you? More importantly, how does it inspire you? How do the mechanics of your inspiration work? Comment; let me know.

3 Comments:

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12:31 AM  
Blogger jinnie said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

7:03 PM  
Blogger jinnie said...

mechanics of my inspirations.. that's a toughie.
well, for me, inspirations don't come easily but when it comes, i don't do anything. really. i just chew it, sleep on it, internalize it for days, even months, years. i've described this to few other people as this huge activation energy (you geeks know it, E with the subscript a). as an illustrator, when i think of an image, an idea, etc., i think about the output. like what would its purpose be, where would it go, what kind of audience would it have? would it fit into my current portfolio, what is its stylistic solution? All these questions, quite honestly, bog me down. They really are this huge bump in the Ea vs t graph. I sometimes desperately wish I can be like other artists who just freely experiment, not afraid of any mistakes or the outcome, just doing art for its means, not the ends.

but when i actually get over that Ea, it's pretty smooth aftwards. a deadline really, i mean, really helps. i didn't realize until i got out school that i need some pressure to be able to work diligently. :)

what inspires me?
small things, like something i see on the bus, or things i remember from my childhood, other artists and their techniques. lately, i've been noticing a lot of cool techniques i'd like to try, and in my mind, i try to see how they would work with my own techniques and what I'm trying to convey.

as for the how part.. inspirations lead me to other inspirations. like memory. i think of things that are associated with whatever gave me an image in my head

but i don't know. i feel like by the time i'm done with a project, the inspiration part is gone. i get so caught up in the process of things, like transfering drawings, measuring the specs, deciding which colors should go first, that the inspirational part gets thinned down. sometimes there would be a small part of a painting that really excites me. i'm told, by teachers, to hold on to it and let it help me get through it. :)

so there you have it. i hope i answered your questions.

7:36 PM  

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