Edition #13
Lisbon, 2010
“DKANDLE weaves swirling multi-colored vibrant unearthly soundscapes, blending fuzzy and reverberating Shoegaze textures, mesmerizing Dream Pop meditations, sludgy Grungey tones and moody Post-punk strains, heightened with soul-stirring lyricism and pensive emotive vocalizations”
Inspiration is creation. It's like the elements or ingredients that are scattered and available on the shelf of the Universe, where we take what interests us to create our work.
We can't produce inspiration out of nowhere - you can't just sit down and say, "Alright, I want to be inspired now!"; it won't really work... Inspiration is not handed to us on a silver platter; we gotta fight for it. It's a process through which we filter what we resonate with; we make a connection, and this inspiration is "downloaded", but it doesn't pass through unalloyed. It's not true that the artist is "just a channel": they are more than a channel because art (music, painting, poetry etc.) is "contaminated", so to speak, by the artist's essence. Only then is the work of art born, which is like a child, born from the union between the individual self and the universal self.
Anyone can attain inspiration, but it doesn't happen just any way; it requires a certain temperament of spirit, combined with the environment where one is and/or lives. To be authentic, the artist must express and give voice to their soul, and also express the totality of the world they live in at that moment. Mozart and Beethoven best expressed the spirit of their time. Their music survives to this day because it masterfully expresses the totality of the spirit of their era. True works of art never exhaust themselves.
But what is well-inspired art and poorly inspired art? It all comes down to sublime. Well-inspired art better translates the sublime - which doesn't necessarily need to be beautiful, mind you. The sublime has more to do with enchantment, which touches the core of being and leaves you in awe through intense emotion. Even songs made solely from collages and samples can cause this admiration - the way you create the music doesn't matter in the slightest. Poorly inspired art is contaminated by the trivialities of the world, where the market is put before everything, then music ceases to be art and becomes a product.
Originality is never total. The non-self is necessary for inspiration to exist. What kind of music would someone create if they had never heard other music before in their life? They wouldn't even know what music is. They need external references, outsourced foundations. The internal merges with the external; therefore, the self, immersed in itself, would never be able to express its essence. We must draw from various other sources to create our original work. But it's necessary to offer and produce something beyond what has already been done, otherwise, it will just be a copy. The artist should always aim to do what no one has ever done. Creating is bringing something new, adding something. Let's mirror ourselves in the best, choose some as models, because no one thinks from nothing, but we should not copy them - there is no creativity in that.
Your art must be recognized by others to attest to its value. It has nothing to do with quantity, but with quality - the main criterion of Art is pleasure. But this should not be confused with wanting to please the public by playing it safe, betting on what is already consolidated and riding the wave. I'll emphasize this: you must be stoic and not compromise with the market. You must bet big on your originality, because what people really want is something new, everyone always wants something new! So try to bring new, unusual things that make people say "WTF is that? I loved it!". They loved it because you're finally bringing what that person wanted but didn't even know about it.
A dynamic of absence is necessary. It's common to be more inspired at some times than others, but we can't be inspired all the time, because inspiration needs to be fed by life's experiences. We need to constantly dive into the ocean of our lives and gradually acquire experiences that, like a volcano, will culminate in a connection with inspiration. "Truth, even literary truth, is not the fruit of chance," said Deleuze. You could sit in front of a piano for 50 years and never extract from it the divine phrase of a song. There are laws in artistic production.
The environment also greatly influences inspiration. You will be much more inspired in certain environments than in others. But this doesn't mean that inspiration on a paradisiacal beach is necessarily better than in a hospital. Often, pain is a great source of inspiration. As Vinícius de Moraes said: "To make a beautiful samba, you need a bit of sadness"...
But it's not just the external environment that matters. We can also gain great inspiration with our eyes closed, meditative, or even while dreaming. Perhaps dream inspiration is the "purest" possible, because the spirit is much freer and can thus have much more access to the Thing-in-Itself. Many people dream of a piece of music, a strong image, a storyline for a book/film, or a poem, and upon waking, they bring to the physical world what they saw/heard in the dream and gift us with their art. The idea of the periodic table, for example, is said to have come to its creator, Mendeleev, while he was asleep: "I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required. Upon waking, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper."
These dreams can give the impression that inspiration arises from nothing, from a magical moment of inspiration. But a lot of perspiration is needed before the dream... The moment of inspiration is actually a condensed result of your entire life history; only you, with your life experience, could produce what you did. Your inspiration is a mirror of who you are. You are a constantly moving river, and inspiration arises from this river.
INSPIRATION IN ANCIENT GREECE
The Greek term for "enthusiasm" means being possessed by the breath or spirit of a god. The muse, which is the idea of inspiration, speaks of transcendence, an overcoming. Socrates gave the example of a poet who made a single good poem in his life, and the rest was rubbish, but that one good poem was sung by all the Greeks; he thought that this didn't depend on the poet, because if it did, he would have made others. He only made one because it was his only moment of inspiration when the gods favored him. If he really had the technique, he would have been able to make a second poem as good.
The muses are daughters of the memory of Zeus, the most powerful of the Olympic gods. Zeus is lightning, the instant, the moment, the immediate, where everything is resolved. The muses are daughters of the moment, of the lightning instant that reveals and allows appearance with memory. The muses are the starting point of poetry.
Before the poet exhales the word with their voice, they must inhale the air. Inspiration is this breath they bring, which provides the voice. This air, this breath is life itself. Breathing is power. The Greeks said that the diaphragm is the most important vital force, because it is through it that the word comes out. The spirit is a breath. Homer, in the second canto of the Iliad, recites the warriors present at the Trojan War, and to account for this enormous enumeration, he needed at that moment a greater breath, so he invoked the muses.
All the arts have a meaning connected to the formation of men, to the transmission of knowledge, and this appears in the primary power of the muses. The song is the expiration of the chant to glorify the future and the past. The power that the muses give to poets is the power to sing, to glorify both the past and the future. The muses know what will be, what was, and what always is.
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