From “The Discipline of Inspiration: The Mysterious Encounter with God at the Heart of Creativity” by Carey Wallace
The vast majority of teaching in the arts is devoted to technique: developing the technical skill to execute an artistic vision. Or taxonomy: how to identify and sort the products of creation.
That’s because both technique and taxonomy lend themselves easily to academic discipline – the ordered syllabus, the predictable relationship between practice and skill. We teach what we can measure, and what we can reliably deliver.
If inspiration is discussed at all, the conversation usually happens outside class. Artists swap tricks during studio hours, pick up clues from offhand comments, look for patterns in our own experience: the way ideas often arrive in the shower, in conversation, just before sleep, the way a glance away from our work can set our stalled minds free to receive.
A professor tells a student to go for a walk when the ideas won’t come
An architect goes to bed, even in the middle of the day, when she’s got a problem she can’t solve.
Some people live a lifetime with inspiration that seems both unpredictable and ferocious.
Some suffer for years from inspiration’s absence.
Some develop a wealth of experience with inspiration through consistent discipline.
But we often harbor a deep superstition that any attempt to understand inspiration might permanently disrupt its vital but mysterious machinery.
And another fear: perhaps that machinery can only operate in perfect obscurity.
Others hold inspiration in contempt, as the addiction of amateurs.
Or question whether it even exists
.
But that chorus of denials only shows how many people have had the experience of inspiration, and how many of us are looking for ways to understand and negotiate with it.