"Live all you can; it’s a mistake
not to."
—Henry James, The Ambassadors
Last
summer, I tripped and fell in the yard, and my cry summoned
my husband from our house. I lay flat on my back, looking
up at him and the sky, simultaneously laughing and crying.
"I just thought of the first line for my next chapter,"
I told him. "Anna was accident prone."
He helped me up. Then
he smiled and said, "I pity you poor writers. What
you go through for one good sentence."
This was a joke between
us.
"You have to be
crazy to do it," he added.
He knew I wouldn’t
argue. There is no good reason to be a writer—or an
artist of any kind—unless one is compelled to be. But
neither is there a much more rewarding enterprise. Furthermore,
though all the divine inspiration in the world won’t
forestall the inevitable sweat labor of the work
of making art, artistic opportunity often knocks into one
while one is crossing the yard.
What is the nature of
the creative impulse? Is it bio-chemical? A kind of neurosis?
Can it be learned? Can it be crushed?
The artist perceives—and
at some future point transcribes her perception—in
a particular and individual way, a way that resonates beyond
the personal experience to illuminate a human truth. Is
the creative impulse born of a way of seeing the world,
a heightened awareness? Joan Didion wrote that the writer
is afflicted presumably since birth with "a presentiment
of loss", engendering the need to capture what is transient.
Does the writer hold a mirror to her awareness of being
in order to prove she exists? Or is the writer’s desire
to play God, to observe with an eye toward bestowing order—pattern
and form—upon chaos?
What inspires, anyway?
One might say everything, but that is as good as saying
nothing. And indeed, we are none of us continuously inspired.
So how is inspiration, that headiest of states, achieved?
Must we wait for the muse to strike or can we go in search
of her?
Clearly, sometimes,
she strikes unbidden. I am not a strict enough Freudian
to suppose I deliberately tripped myself in order to come
up with an opening line to my chapter. However, I was quick
to seize the experience, to "use" it, as writers
say. And that I think is what mostly happens. Something
trips us up, literally or otherwise, and an electrical,
Frankenstein-connection in the mind is made. The light bulb
goes off. We say yes, I see, this reveals something.
Can we go in search
of the muse? Not really, though we try. Michael Chabon says
writers will entangle themselves into dramatic situations
in order to write about them. And we are well versed in
the traditions of muse-searching by way of the bottle or
the opium pipe or the passionate embrace. It’s certain,
as well, that as long as the sun blazes and the ocean roars
and the moon rises in the sky, writers will be moved to
write of them. And still, when it happens, when we see the
newly-imaginable take shape before our mind’s eye,
we are filled with excitement and gratitude, as for a gift—or
a miracle.
Now I am stopped at
a light on the way to fetch my son from school. In the left
lane in front of me, a woman driving a white Jeep flips
her hair with her hand. That gesture, the easy grace of
it, the sleek fall hair against cheek, reminds me of a friend
from thirty years ago. My husband’s first lover, in
fact; we met through her. That gesture releases a flood
in me. I know if I were to meet that woman in the white
Jeep I would react to her largely out of my associations
with J__. I am back in the communal house we shared with
a half dozen others. I’m in her room, we’re smoking
cigarettes, she’s telling me about using a speculum
to view her cervix.
I take notes, scribbling
as the light changes. Will these words become part of a
story, a poem, a character in a novel? I don’t know.
Will I forget I wrote this and come across it some months,
perhaps years in the future? Very possibly. Or I might continue
to play with the image and the memory, their dynamics perhaps
informing a dream. If I write tomorrow morning, I may envision
a scene in which two good friends who are in competition
reveal their boundaries and the covert rules of their engagement.
That’s how it works
for me. In painting and photography as well. I tend to go
back and forth from verbal to non-verbal modes of expressing,
that is to say, from writing phases to painting/photography
phases. I used to worry when immersed in one modality that
I had lost the ability to perform the other. But I’ve
learned my own cycles. I approach them openly now, curious
what will come, secure that it too shall pass.
In fact, that’s
my basic approach to life, especially in these times. There’s
only one way to nourish the creative impulse, wherever it
derives: Live all you can! 
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