Inspiration and the Tide

In her Nobel Lecture after winning the Prize for Literature in 1996, the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska explained how difficult it was to answer questions about inspiration. “Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It’s not that they’ve never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It’s just not easy to explain to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.”

Her thoughts have given me a lot of comfort, especially when she also remarked, “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from from a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”

I don’t know, for example, if the lagoon in this painting still exists in the town where I grew up. In winter we skated on its ice. In summers there were twilight concerts from the circular bandstand; people gathered around the shores to listen, perhaps to dance. Now there’s only a woman banging a drum, a man playing a trumpet, and a monkey on a leash. Does the animal carry a tin cup for donations? I wonder. And from whom?

The girls dancing in a circle also showed up in another image, “Texas Truck,” which I posted on this page recently. Why they appear in this painting, and wearing clothes, I don’t know.

The mood feels slightly ominous, but perhaps it’s only nostalgia, a real or imagined past that nudges us. What sounds could the musicians be making that impel the girls to dance? I don’t know. But like them, I love music. So even though I can’t hear it, I feel like dancing with them.

Inspiration feels like music I can barely hear. So I listen. And listen. And follow it, wherever it might lead me.