Titled “Where Does Art Come From?” my dissertation was an intellectual history of inspiration. To early civilizations, it was a gift — or curse — from the gods. The ancient Greeks held the Muses responsible for inspiration, which they distinguished from skill or technical ability; mere artisans toiled to refine their craft, whereas artists were mouthpieces for what divine entities wished to express. But if ventriloquism was semiautomatic, it was still exhausting and not exactly fun. Plato in Ion described poetic inspiration as a sort of possession, a maddening ordeal.
The Hebrew tribes also looked to the divine. Samuel gave Saul fair warning that Yahweh’s inspirational methods were heavyhanded: “The spirit of the Lord will come powerfully upon you, and you will prophesy … and you will be changed into a different person.” Christians replaced Yahweh with the Holy Ghost. Tertullian, for instance, explained that God, through the Holy Ghost, “flooded” the minds of the prophets. Granted, Jews and Christians were preoccupied with revelation, not epic poetry, but in those days there wasn’t such a clear distinction between theology and fiction.
As Western societies became more secular, the explicit God talk fell out of fashion. The Romantics compared the artistic process to a passive chemical reaction. They argued that poets were — unconsciously — sensitive to mysterious energies or winds, which they converted into creative enterprise. Yes, wind was a metaphor, but not for anything terribly concrete. “Poetry,” Shelley said, “is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will.” On the contrary, “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”
Then along came Sigmund Freud, who said that what his forebears had thought was supernatural or, at any rate, external to the self was actually the subconscious at work. Writers wrote, painters painted because of early childhood trauma, deep psychological wounds, which they sublimated into poems, novels, paintings. Marxists, for their part, thought that was just as silly as Shelley’s fading-coal theory. They looked not to infancy but to the economy, theorizing that art was always, necessarily, an expression of social conditions. Artists were mirrors.
Although the concept of inspiration had changed dramatically over the centuries, I argued that one element remained steady: Everyone seemed to think that it was out of the artist’s control. The artist cannot train the Muses or the Holy Ghost. He cannot force his mind to channel inconstant winds. He cannot will his parents to traumatize him. He cannot tame macroeconomic trends.
I also argued that, although this lack of control in one sense minimized the role of the artist, it simultaneously made the artist seem special. Art was not just another trade. If a young woman decides she wants to be a doctor, she can go to medical school and learn about the human body. If a young man decides he wants to be a builder, he can find a job at a construction company and learn about concrete. But if that same young woman or young man decides, No, I’d rather be an artist, then it’s game over. You’re out of luck. Unless, that is, you happen to have been chosen by God/have the right disposition to channel winds/have had a difficult childhood. Either you’ve been touched, or you haven’t.
But — this was totally ridiculous, was it not? All sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds became artists, and no brain scan had ever discovered some artist-specific pathway. Each and every theory of inspiration was bullshit designed to make artists feel as though they belonged to a special class, even though there was no evidence of that class beyond the tautology that all artists had something in common — which was that they were artists.
“It’s a little thin,” said Professor Carl Davidoff. My adviser was short and pudgy and somehow pulled off the trick of looking swarthy despite having light skin, a result of his thick, dark, almost black curly hair and equally thick, dark eyebrows. For a full professor, he was young, in his late thirties. He cleaned his glasses to avoid taking in my expression. “The historical overview is fine but your conclusion, your actual thesis, feels a little thin,” he repeated.
“Care to elaborate?”
“My assessment is more or less the same as it was three months ago, and six months ago, and twelve months ago. It doesn’t seem to be sinking in —”
“This has changed a lot in the last twelve months —”
“Let me finish, Anna,” he interrupted. He was in the habit of using my name when he wanted to convey that he meant business, like a kindergarten teacher scolding an unruly five-year-old. “It’s a good observation: There’s a seemingly universal tendency to place inspiration beyond the artist’s control. You believe this tendency, this assumption, is wrong, even stupid. Fine. But if you really think that all theories of inspiration are stupid — all of them — then you need to suggest an alternative. I’ve said this before. You keep ignoring me and fine-tuning what you have instead.”
“It’s just work.”
“What is?”
“That’s my alternative theory. There’s no such thing as inspiration. Writing is work like anything else. It’s just creative work instead of physical work or what have you. Bankers bank. Plumbers plumb. Sculptors sculpt. Writers write. I once heard Naomi Wolf quote her father: ‘The writer who goes out with the bucket daily seems to provoke the rain.’ He had the guts to make art sound mundane.”
“Citing other people’s arguments won’t impress me. You always do that when you’re not sure what to say. If you believe the Wolf line, do the work of proving it. You need a case study. I’ve said this before: Enough with the lit review. Choose an author to examine closely. His biography. His output. Think about what it is that caused him to write. Connect what happened off the page to what happened on it. Don’t smirk. This is basic. Fisher-Price My First Academic Paper.”
“Wow.”
“Sorry. I’d recommend Milton if there weren’t already dozens of books on his process. He spent years after university obsessively reading the classics without writing much at all, living off his father’s investments. He traveled through Europe, still not writing, dabbled in politics, then, finally, drafted a drama that would become his epic. He said it came easily! You must know the line — the celestial patroness who nightly dictates to the slumbering poet his ‘unpremeditated verse.’ ”
“How nice, to wake up and find a few more pages of Paradise Lost at your feet.”
Better than a nocturnal emission, I did not add.
Professor Davidoff’s office, laid out like a psychoanalyst’s with a leather armchair for him and a leather couch for his visitors, was overheated and stuffy. I wondered why he didn’t open the window since he was visibly uncomfortable; a few beads of sweat had trickled down his forehead and I had to resist the urge to dab him with a tissue. Some future civilization would master temperature control. It was thirty degrees outside and what felt like eighty degrees inside, hastening climate change.
“I should ask — is there something going on?” he said.
“No.”
“Some reason you’re finding it so hard to finish?”
“My parents think I’m lazy.”
“Oh?”
“They say I need to stop procrastinating.”
Professor Davidoff scratched the dry skin around his nose, a compulsive habit.
Again the conversation flagged and I thought back to the time, many years earlier, when I’d attended a Quaker meeting in backwoods Vermont. It began with