Inspiration and its Demands

A Complete Unknown

For some days now my substack has been knocking at the door of my mind. It’s time to write something, come on, go to it! But I can’t simply reply to that knock like that. I have to be in a certain awareness. I have to gather myself to be present and sound out my deepest questions. It’s through being present that I write. I don’t plan it out, I listen for what comes. This time Bob Dylan came.

It’s pretty unusual for me to go out to the movies. I mean I like movies a lot, especially k-dramas (a secret love of mine) but that would be at home, on the computer or youtube with my cat on my lap. This time a friend of mine invited me to see A Complete Unknown with Timothee Chalamet. So I went. (Stunning acting by Chalamet by the way.)

I grew up in the time of Dylan, his music was played in our home. My friend, a few years older than myself also remembers the era. Watching the movie we laughed out loud at the gestures and moments that brought back those times. Like when Dylan (Chalamet) lights two cigarettes in his mouth and offers one to the woman he is with, (60’s cool) or scrambles to clean up the apartment he has trashed in a creative, mindless frenzy to get out the words rushing into his head, crowding him to be written-so evocative of the times: the serendipity, the casual opportunism.

The movie pictures Dylan being embraced by the folk music world, with Pete Seeger ushering him in. Seeger is shown to be the kind evangelist of folk. I remember, from my childhood, how upset people were when Dylan went electric. We were betrayed, and baffled that our new hero of folk shifted away from that glorious channeling; the direct voice of the times, of youth, of honesty. For many, electric guitar was just noise. It was a shocking shift. The movie does a good job of demonstrating the tension between an individual’s creative explorations and the monster that audience expectation can become.

The way others respond to your art can become a voice in your process. I think it is a distracting one. The dance of art making is between the artist and the muse. But yes, there comes a time when the voice of others participate. How to navigate that inevitable influence becomes a new aspect of art making, no matter how subtle or strong.

Not long after the time period depicted in the movie, Bob Dylan had a terrible motor cycle accident. After this, his writing process changed. Quoting Dylan on this transition below.

from the 1985 Chronicles: Volume One (his memoir):

Before (the crash) I was writing all the time, just putting it down, pouring it out. It was as natural as breathing. But after the accident, I began to see songwriting in a different light. I realized that I wasn’t going to get away with just spilling out words. It became more like a job, a task, something that had to be crafted, like everybody else does it.

from his 1978 Playboy interview:

I don’t know why, but after my accident, I just couldn’t write songs the same way I had before. Before that, I could almost say that I didn’t write the songs, they just came to me. After the crash, it was like I had to force myself to write, to make it work. I had to approach it the way other people write, with more effort.

from his 1971 Rolling Stone interview:

Before my accident, I was doing everything on impulse. I was a spontaneous kind of person. But after that, it became different. I had to go back and really think about things. I couldn’t just pick up a guitar and play anymore. I had to think about it. It wasn’t so easy to come up with things.

I am intrigued by the shift that Dylan describes, and I mourn with him a little bit.

Maybe most creatives have experienced the sudden and virtually complete gifts that arrive, sometimes almost unbidden. Poetry that seems as if it is dictated. Music already written. Pottery fully visualized. I think artists share the sense that their obligation is to embody and bring into being the art that has entered them. Probably it is best to shut out other voices from this process so that you can hear most clearly the art that forms through the occasion of you.

There is a sense, I think, that as an artist it is your mandate to bring the art into being as purely and accurately as possible. You may not even know until sometime after its emergence what it is trying to say. It is best not to violate the terms of the message.

The painting above is one that came to me and wanted to stay in that state. Both the physical gestures of the strokes and the colors on the canvas felt in sync. It is a part of a dialogue I am having right now. I won’t argue that it is a great painting, but it is part of the dialogue. It is very distinct for me which paintings I paint are “real” paintings and which are not. This one is real for me because it clearly wanted to be in this form, and also announced to me that it is finished. We can all share the experience of art making as a dialogue with our muse. We are merely servants, in a way, to the process, and we have to approach it with integrity. The movie suggests that Dylan was responding to the pressure of his art when he moved to electric guitar. He was dancing the dance he needed to dance to respond to his muse. In that way, he had to violate the demands of his audience. As an individual, he may have suffered a bit for this, and he may not have been the nicest person at that time of his life, but he was a good servant to his muse.

There are many directions I could take at this point in this essay. One is to move in the direction of insight as a comparable visitation of the muse. Muse becomes an inadequate word now, though recognizable. Perhaps it is better to say Self, or Awareness. Insights, are also announcements from within and demand to be articulated. The obligation of the one who receives insight is to bring his life to the level of the insight through practice. The obligation of the artist is to create the art. Here’s the thing-both insight and artistic inspiration come with demands. The one gifted with either has to bring the idea to fulfillment or they will fail to be the adequate vehicle for the gift. If you fail enough times, you won’t be offered more gifts. It is a partnership of sorts between that which inspires and the one who receives.

Dylan was a consummate voice of a generation. He furiously fulfilled his duty with the adequate personality to refuse too much shaping by the voice of his audience. Some of his work is really really great, but I think myself what matters most is that it is true. I know he is a story teller, but sometimes a story is truer than fact.

Namaste,

Leslie

ps thanks to Liam Lawson for his thoughts on Dylan, and to Janet Snoyer for sharing movie night with me.