Wonderment

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

Albert Einstein

The word inspiration comes from the Latin inspirare, meaning “to breath into.”

Anyone who has felt it knows why that makes sense.  Under the influence of inspiration, there seems to be a force at work outside of our calculating minds.  Inspired creators often say that they feel they are in the grip of something, carried along on a wave of energy, or perhaps even experiencing what athletes refer to as being “in the zone.”  This is a wonderful point at which one loses control and yet still seems to be compelled towards a resolution.  Call it a neurotingle or a carnival in the cortex…or just a sense of awe or awesomeness.

It is the ability to experience this feeling of wonderment that needs to go into the Ingenarium.  Being open to the richness of life and letting it flow through you.  Lasciarsi ardare is an operatic term meaning let it pour forth and that applies well to this unique moment when we are both breathed into and breathed through.

Artists know it well, if they are lucky; a strange awareness of being both an “in” and “out” basket at the same time, giving in to something beyond your power but outwardly empowered by it anyway.  In this way, Noel Coward referred to the process by which he wrote his play Blithe Spirit as a “psychic gift.”  He was referring to the feeling of letting go and allowing the creativity to unfold, almost as a bystander to the event.

Writers often talk about the sensation of transcribing the words rather than creating them.

Vladimir Nabokov was more specific about this when he wrote about the way in which inspiration seemed to come in phases and the way that artists had to surrender to them.  First, he wrote, there was the “prefatory glow,” the feeling of “tickly well-being” that banishes all awareness of physical discomfort.  The feeling does not yield its secret just yet, he said, but a window has been opened and some wind has blown in.  Some time later, Nabokov continued, the writer “forefeels what he is going to tell.”  There is an instant vision, the lightning bolt of inspiration, that turns into rapid speech, and a “tumble of merging words” that form the nucleus of a work that will grow from it over the ensuing months or years.  In other words, you have been breathed into and now have to turn that currency into a real thing, which is no small task in and of itself.

Inspiration and wonderment are inspiring and wonderful…but creativity still takes patience and work and effort.

The most interesting aspect of this is the sense most people who experience it have that it is occurring outside of themselves, something over which they do not seem to have any control.  That is an unusual situation to be in, especially for people working hard to manipulate materials and ideas and output.  It is liberating but also a little weird.  Unfortunately, you cannot make inspiration happen.  But what you can do is put together the time, energy, raw materials, and information that you need to take advantage of it when it does.  Anyone can be inspired, but that only becomes useful if you are prepared to turn it into a project.

The Ingenarium is a practical device and so planning and craftwork and practice are all part of it.  But let us not forget to also add this sense of awe, this openness to the flow of insight, the acceptance of inspiration when and if it happens to us.  The inventor Michael Faraday said, “Nothing is too wonderful to be true.”  It is an acceptance of – and a trust in – that kind of oceanic feeling that we need to include in our whizbang.