I Ask For Inspiration

Where is inspiration? Where does one look for it? How does one search for it without altering its divine fire?

There will be many who are stimulated by the current state of affairs and those who will record with great detail how the shattered world around them has devoured their life at home. Some will express it through words, some through music; there will be sculptures carved and paintings made, all echoing the paralyzing effects of the present. So, when and if all these people are finished with their creative processes, I will ask: “where did you find your inspiration to create?”

When and where does the inspiration take its breath? I ask this question now, because in times of prolonged, stupefying, unanswerable disasters, it is the feeling of inspiration that succumbs to the grimness of the reality.

And yet, looking through history, we see it in the greats who found inspiration to write, create and think even in the darkest of times. I think of Dmitri Shostakovich, who composed his 7^th Symphony in 1941, in the middle of the siege of Leningrad. I think of Pablo Picasso, who remained in Paris during World War II and never stopped working through it all. I think of the Renaissance  painter Titian, who worked until he died from the plague in 1576. What about Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky — all of whom lived and worked in the Soviet Union, that abyss of intellectual and physical agony? There are countless others.

Their inspiration came from within their inner being. Talent begets inspiration. It does not need anything but itself, and that is how it will never stop giving life to inspiration.

Before the pandemic, I allowed myself to think that I was one of those talented few. I thought that every word sprouting from my head would be enough to self-create this inspiration and then multiply it twofold. If I were completely honest with myself, if I were to dissect my entire process of writing when inspiration was my sole guiding light, the majesty of language itself was the reason why I wanted to sit down and write something.

A few months ago, sitting at my desk, I wrote words and sentences without ever needing to search for this treasured inspiration. Humbly and flirtatiously, I was willing to admit to myself that I, too, was able to create this inspiration out of my own skin. Days and months passed, events happened, and the fickleness of my moods did not upset the flow of my work.

Did I have talent? I didn’t ask myself that question. The question itself would have been too dishonest, too unnatural. How could I think that I was not talented? For months, I wrote in a state of utter exaltation and sober self-satisfaction. It was my moral duty to believe in my talent or to at least have the audacity to discover it.

When I finished a piece of writing that kept me busy and inspired for a long time, I did not trouble myself about the source of my inspiration. I always thought that inspiration was something that came to me from within. Whenever I experienced moments of creative silence, I attributed them to that necessary, subliminal noble silence which is the breeding ground for the next wave of creative eruption. I obediently waited for it. Sometimes it took time, sometimes it didn’t. When it took longer than I anticipated, I expressed my egotistical frustration with idleness, which is sometimes cloaked in what they call “writer’s block.”

I kept patiently waiting for my savior, for my inspiration. I summoned it with my subdued wit and begged it to take its gentle roots in my hollow spirit again. And then, it would suddenly appear. I would start to write again.

I kept patiently waiting for my savior, for my inspiration.

I composed my poems, both in my all-forgiving, free Russian and in my beguilingly alien and hopelessly unconquerable English. I wrote and heard music in every word I wrote. Harmony broke through phrases before they turned into full sentences, and then into paragraphs. Poems varied in mood and style; I guess I was experimenting. I distinctly remember that I sat down to write whenever I was very angry or irritated. Happiness was neither a muse or a poetic companion — perhaps because it contained too much vanity.

I existed in this idyllic reality for years, allowing myself to have noble faith in the ability to self-create inspiration independently, autonomously and with my own free will. I uncompromisingly decided that truly talented people did not need to drain the channels of this universe in search of inspiration, for it is their talent alone, inside them, that breeds that very inspiration.

However, March, April, May, June passed, and my uncomfortable, gloating and brazen present glares at me without mercy. Where is this talent of mine now? Why can’t I hear even its faintest melody, or even the premonition of its humming rhyme? What was crisp and full of grace just a few months ago is dull and stiffly unbalanced today. Stale. Flat.

I know now that this is not some noble block of a wandering writer. I cannot hide my limp talent behind those meaningless words, because this disease, these phantom streets, this fear and lack of hope whisper all sorts of disagreeable truths about my talent. The words are crumbled, sentences make no sense, and ideas are vacuous because they are the product of labor alone — but not of inspiration.

My seemingly healthy body, along with my seemingly healthy mind, has been unable to do anything in this environment of disdainful emptiness. For a few weeks now, when I go outside covered in a mask, I have been breathing the air of the unwanted spring, and I have been trying in vain to detect in its emptiness hints of what they call “hope.”

I always stayed away from the word “hope,” because it smelled too much of socialism (perhaps I watched too many socialist propaganda movies in which the main characters used this word too many times). At the same time, deep inside me, the word “anticipation” moved my senses much more. Anticipating hope excited me. Although hope by itself was immobile and distant, anticipating this very hope was tantalizing, mystical and even promising. It was unmistakably inspiring, for there was something infinite in anticipation itself.

Anticipating this very hope was tantalizing, mystical and even promising.

So, on these daily walks outside, I try to catch the scent of anticipation. Have I been doing so because I wanted to return to my comfortable New York life or because I have been summoning inspiration to oil my brittle mind? All honest efforts to distract my mind with the daily necessities of domestic life, such as trips to the grocery store, cooking and hours of homeschooling, have lost their flicker of initial charm. I have come to resent the new role I think I am meant to play in all this, being unable to concentrate on anything other than things of domestic nature, my troubling lack of focus, sense of motherly satisfaction at being together with my family, the feeling of constant fear for every member of the family and a gnawing feeling of sadness for the life I had to stop having in such a cataclysmic and clumsy way.

As I walk, I feel no anticipation of hope and sense no inspiration rising within me. As it turns out, I was average; I had no talent at all. I was just a capable body which was in continuous need of being inspired by something. And this something was the mundane promise of safety and happiness, which saturated every corner of my neighborhood when they were seething with healthy people who walked, breathed, gossiped, dirtied the streets and caressed my ears with their needless conversations.

I sense now that what I searched for, that something, was also concealed in the tickling excitement of that endless stream of social events, concerts, dinners, dresses, beautiful people, gossip, whirlwind summer travels, the first symptoms of the fall and the shadow of a      New York winter, with its dashing celebratory aplomb and its precious breaths of snow.

Every night, when the moon is out, I slightly open the curtain and fearfully glance outside. I see the moon and a naked Third Avenue, with its glossy pavements, its grotesquely shiny roads. One of Russia’s great writers, Viktor Shklovsky, describes the staniza in Chechnya, a very troubled war-ridden region, in the Caucasus mountains in late 1840s and early 1850s. He writes that even though all was quiet in the region, there was no peace. When I read those lines, I thought about my street, especially at night, when the moon with its aloof punctuality bids us good night.

All I can smell through my window is the smell of the hospitals located a few blocks away, the grime of this novel disease and its stubborn hammer of death. This is all I can feel, and this is all I can think about. There is no room in my body for inspiration to write and no room to anticipate hope enabling me to write. This is where I knew that I lacked the talent to create inspiration from emptiness.

I am an artisan. Artisans cannot create without simple peace. But the immobility and the silence of my street revealed to me that for all these years, there wasn’t a single moment that my own sovereign self was ever responsible for creating inspiration. Inspiration — which I thought was my own, which I obviously flaunted, which I cradled in my arms as if it was my own child — was, in fact, not mine at all. I extracted it from life…when life was alive. The very instant Life stopped making its habitual noises, my weak, very ordinary talent found itself in a void with nothing to create, because the actual source of my power was now gone.

All my life, I remember my grandmother wishing things for me. Since I was a tiny girl,      she wished me things with vehemence and passion, in telegrams, in notes, in letters, whenever we spoke on telephone or when she made her famous long-winded speeches at those banquets of hers. Among all those wishes, which sounded more like instructions, there was one wish she favored among all others. Etched in my memory, her words reach me now in all their brilliant lucidity: “Anya, I wish you INSPIRATION.”

This was an edict! It was her uncompromising, irrevocable command directed at me! I never understood what she meant by that. The word in Russian sounded long, emotional and cataclysmic. She declared it with joy and a sense of unbending necessity without which my life, or anyone else’s life, was not worth living. Instinctively, and with the most wretched sense of panic, I sensed that without this very inspiration, not only would I not be able to write, but facing yet another morning would be impossible.

I had learned to understand my grandmother before she died. I became acquainted with the forces that drove her character during her lifetime, but the enigma behind her special relationship with this inspiration has only become clear to me now, ten years after her death, in the middle of this ruinous pandemic. Now, when I find it difficult to get up in the morning, to smile at my daughters, to pretend to have willpower, to make plans for weeks that have long ago lost their seasonal contrast and when every thought I try to transfer onto paper seems to turn into an ugly frog — then I know that all I desire is the return of the life I had before this grotesque disaster.

I want my life back, the one which with so much generosity enveloped my ungrateful, frivolous body. Life in all its sweeping arrangements made me gasp with inspiration. I am not a real talent, but my creative existence depends only on those things which are living and tirelessly commingling, regardless of whether I exist or not. They have no need of me, but I am in most burning need of them. They are my inner rhythms, my music; they are the words that I am searching for; they are the source of something infinite. They are my inspiration.

The other day I walked on Park Avenue, completely alone on  what, just a couple of months ago,was one of the busiest streets of Manhattan. I looked around. Abandoned construction sites, galleries with frozen exhibits stuck behind glass windows, rows of dull office buildings, cozy apartment blocks — everything my eye had come to adore, to overlook and even to admonish looked orphaned and disconnected now.

And yet, amid this unrestrained desertion, my eyes suddenly were confronted with waves of red. Tulips. They plant tulips on Park Avenue every year and did so this year as well. Regardless of the pandemic, the seeds sprouted and bloomed into flowers. Their oval heads bounced stoically in the direction of the betraying wind, their graceful stems supporting them in that uneven fight.

Suddenly, the tenacious dance of those red tulips altered the desperate dullness of my mood. Were my emotions trite? Do wars and disasters do this to people, or only to ordinary people? Does despair trivialize their minds and simplify their souls? But so what if it does! I welcomed the banality of what I felt, because with it I sensed how the inspiration I waited for so long began to tickle my throat.

The tenacious dance of those red tulips altered the desperate dullness of my mood.

The red color of those tulips, their will to live, their artistic sensuality and even knowing that in the end, the flowers’ disheveled petals will lose their battle against nature ignited me with inspiration to go on.

And so, through the dull mist of my smudged street, every muscle in my discouraged body was igniting with new sparks. Perhaps it was just one spark. For that one moment, I felt inspired again. I felt inspired enough to believe that people still lived on my street in those phantom looking buildings, that life did not disappear, that death was not omnipresent and that my moon’s mystical glow will soon stop exposing my city’s desperate desolation and will again turn its face to the stars. 

Anya Gillinson is a published author of poetry in Russian and English. She practices law in New York, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.