Consider these few examples. Kenyan playwright, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote his first three plays over a period of three years, beginning in his mid-20s. While this feat was on its own impressive, he would go on to write more creative works, some even in his native language.
Yuja Wang is an acclaimed Chinese classical musician. Her virtuosity over decades typifies the notion that there may be no place in the world where the works of Western classical music tradition are as admired as in China. Starting with her flattering attire, she ignored perceived strictures in the replay of the canons of piano music, but incorporated angularity in it that has produced her version of 21st century classical music.
The German female abstract artist, Daniela Schweinsberg, is often touted as being in a class of her own. She creates textured, dynamic works of art using several media that include ink, ore, charcoal, paint and acrylic. Her creative works are challenging and visceral, while they bring attention to life's forms, pulsate with organic energy and colour, and bridge the gap between objects and imagery and imagination.
All these three are living members of the vast creative class. I have randomly chosen them here for nothing else other than their fame. Their significant and exceptional creative output, just as that of others like them everywhere and in every creative sphere, is attributed to what is typically called inspiration.
Inspiration is the unplanned process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something creative. That stimulation may arise out of any number of phenomena such as nature, study, art, people, solitude, etc.
Significantly, research confirms that we are at our most creative phase when we are driven by intrinsic motivation. This is when the motivation for our creative output is simply to pursue joy for ourselves instead of seeking validation, profit, fame or recognition through our works. The same research also shows that external motivation for doing creative work, such as the yearning for wealth, celebrity, or affirmation, often impairs the creative impulses that influence creative individuals.
One way to see the acquisition of competence in a creative sphere is this. First, one must see it as an accumulation of countless and persistent effort from successive layers of mental and sensuous choices. Second, one ought to see it as a long and arduous journey of creating a work from boundless curiosity, perception or fantasy.
The result of all this will be the discovery of a style of creating, not as a body of rigid rules, but rather as the adoption of a personal creative language. This language will be digestible to the one who is uninitiated in that inspired creative work inasmuch as it is intelligible to the one who is instructed in that work. The outcome of this development is a sense of the validity of inspiration, a sense that communicates itself as an audio-visual and intellectual validation of the resultant competence in that creative space.
Inspiration means a lot, metaphysically, philosophically and practically. Although it is innate to us as humans, we seem slow to acknowledge its physical presence in our lives, indeed, its realness in us. Yet, it is it that has given us the stirrings of our hearts; the consideration of our world; and the appreciation of the creative works of literature, music, theatre, art, movies and all the other portals of the human experience.
Drawing from Plato, inspired creative works give wind to the mind, flight to the imagination, charm to sadness, joy to life and soul to the universe. In fact, as their audiences, admirers and critics tend toward the conceptual, philosophical and political rendering of their works, the inspired creators expect them to ponder, delight, reflect and (mis)interpret them.
To expect, as inspired creators often do, what something will be like before the experience of it, is to have a unique insight in the human psyche. In fact, that the works of inspired creators provide us with themes that are different yet eye-opening, humorous yet serious, imaginative yet applicable and abstract yet real, is itself insightful. Thus, it is not surprising that we continue to be challenged or spellbound or enthralled by inspired creative works.
In the 21st century and with the conspiracy of machines and technology, we are rarely left alone to see, hear, wonder, and contemplate, essentially frozen in our place and time, and doing all these at our own pace.
We are continuously required to multitask, to do more and produce more, cheaply, efficiently and quickly. Nonetheless, creative works influenced by inspiration allow us to be contrarian and thus to free ourselves from the shackles, and consequently mock the very idea of machine productivity.
Inspired creative works beckon us into a realm that is both backward and forward looking. This realm ordinarily demands us to figure things out on our own, and challenges us with a version of imagination, design, and purpose that we may not have thought about or may not even have thought possible or desirable. It is it that engages the heart and mind. Thereafter it rewards the audiences, listeners or observers' attention to the creative works by making a vital feedback loop between us the consumer of creative talent and them, the creative class.
It seems to me that at the heart of inspiration and its resultant creative works is both the transmission of experience and the transformation of experience. As it consists in the attempt to articulate the experience of the creative individual, it may appear that the presence and effect of inspiration in the creative works is subjective.
But as it aims to justify that creative individual's experience, in fact, to make a valid judgment about that experience, inspiration may be viewed as objective. It is conceivable that there could be individuals who (wrongly) discount the presence and value of inspiration in our human experience.
But it is inconceivable and impossible that there should be rational individuals from whom inspiration is wholly absent in their lives. In the end, inspiration exerts its power because the magisterial impulse it imposes is felt to move us, to confront us, to challenge us and to embody our ideas and images of collective human experience.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor
