STONES OF OTHERS IN THE POOLS OF INSPIRATION

I thought I would start off the new year by returning to a topic that I've examined several times before: Inspiration. Perhaps returning to the same topic over and over is indicative of a lack of inspiration or it could be that inspiration is an ongoing theme in my life or perhaps I just enjoy thinking in circles because once you start thinking in a straight line you actually have to have a destination ...

Ahem

What inspired this topic, this time around, was one of the gifts Collette got me for Christmas. The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick is a non fiction book by .. well .. Phillip K Dick.

Phillip K Dick was a writer, when I was a fan of his through the 70's and early 80's, he was known as a science fiction writer. Since his death in the mid 80's he has become known as something more; he's become famous for the number of movies based (and I would say very loosely based) on his work, such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau and others. He's also become well known for some of the themes that run through his novels, such as questioning reality and logic, that have brought him recognition outside of the science fiction world

The Exegesis is not a novel, it is a collection of Dick's writings concerning a revelation, an ephiphany you could say, that he experienced in the 70's and caused him to reconsider his fiction in a whole new light. Did I mention he was a serial drug abuser and probably suffered from mental illness?

Anyway, this is not a review of the Exegesis, I have yet to crack the spine. As I stated, it's a post about inspiration. Phillip Dick was an inspiration to me. I devoured most of his novels when I was a teenager. Like all of his fans, I was attracted to his themes of reality or unreality or the sense that there is always something behind whatever we see. I also appreciated his humour and his spare efficiant writing style.

Having this new book and digging out some of those old novels as reference material got to me thinking about the sources of art that were inspirations to me when I was younger, that shaped me as a writing and video creator for better or worse.

Here's a few of them, far from a complete list, but probably some of the most significant works of art in my life, perhaps they will get you thinking about inspired you, what gave you that spark that "aha" moment, that opened your mind and inspired you to do whatever you do, better

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeline L'Engle. This was the first novel I ever read.

I think I was in Grade Five at the time. My teachers considered me literate because I had a vocabulary that was a little more advanced than my classmates but that came from comic books. All I read at that time was comic books. I never had an interest in anything else, fiction wise, they gave me to read in school.

I remember that the school librarian came into the class and it immediately got my attention: A scientist father who goes missing, mysterious beings who may be witches or ETs, the tesseract, which was basically a wormhole before anyone ever used the term wormhole ... I was intrigued and probably for the first time actually put up my hand. I got the book and devoured it. It started me on a science fiction journey that last a few decades and an interest in other worlds, other realities, other experiences that not only led me to Phillip Dick but that led me to the real life stories of adventuerers and explorers that I follow to this day.

And yes, it had an influence on my writing. I don't think I wrote much before I read this novel. While the greatest influences and motivations on my writing always came from people, like my family members and certain teachers, this was probably the source that ignited my  imagination and made me say "I want to so that"

THE CIRCLE GAME by Margaret Atwood. If A Wrinkle In Time got me interested in writing prose, this was the book that got me interested in poetry.

I discovered this book in my first year of high school and up to that point I had never been much exposed to poetry that was structured and lyrical. None of that worked for me. While I would later grow to appreciate Tennyson and such, it was this book that really inspired me to write poetry of my own. It wasn't just the contemporary structure of the poetry it was the subject matter: Atwood didn't write about ancient kings or dead civillizations, she wrote about people trapped in their apartments or lost in a relationship. I related to everything about this poetry

In terms of influences on my poetry or perhaps impetus to write it, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Canadian poet bill bissett. bissett was a radical poet for his time, he took the non rhyming paradigm to a whole new level, using lines and words on the page to create a kind of visual structure for his poems. This was probably my first experience with the concept of negative space. bissett's influence on me continues to this day: He never capitalized his name and when I sign creative works, neither do I.

THE SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN by Leonard Cohen (duh) I don't write music but of course I gravitated towards this album written and sang by a poet

I have a confession to make: I've never been overly fond of Cohen's written poetry but his lyrics are among my favourite poetic compositions. I always had an appreciation for lyrics from the Beetles to Paul Simon but this album, with its fluent language and exotic realities, opened me up to a whole new form of expression. I think this works better for me than Cohen's written words because his somber world-weary voice shades the language here with tones I never gleaned from the page

THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION by Samuel Delany. Another science fiction novel but like Dick, Delany is an author whose concepts and vision exceeds that of most SF fiction while having to rely upon that form in which to be expressed.

This was a novel that pretty much blew me away when I read it as a teenager. I had a read a ton of science fiction at this point and had read a great deal of mythology, mostly Greek and Norse (thank you Thor, Mighty God of Thunder by Stan Lee). But I had never read anything like this. On the surface, this novel (original title A Fabulous Formless Darkness) is like a post apocalyptic retelling of the Orpheus myth but there is much more to it than that. Delany heads each chapter with a lot of quotes, many taken from his journals as he travelled and lived in Turkey and Asia in the early 60's. Through these passages and characters such as the red headed, gilled Kid Death, Delany weaves a more contemporary (to the writing of the story not its futuristic setting) mythology that includes film and literary references into the story

More than Dick, I can point to Delany as a major influence on my own writing. His entire sf/fantasy collection taught me a lot about depth of character, about permitting your characters to have flaws, to not to be afraid to introduce elements of chaos into your plots and how to use themes like colour or repeated language to express ideals. This book in particular opened me up to introducing elements of my own life into fiction

THE SEVEN SAMURAI by Akira Kurosawa. This movie has influenced a great deal of my story telling.

If I was ever to make a full length, full fledged movie, it would likely NOT be an historical samurai movie. Nor do I ever envision writing such a novel. But this movie showed me a lot of things that I had never really understood before: That an adventure story can be a vehicle for examining interpersonal relationships, that action elements can be used as catalyst for character growth, that indeed if your characters don't evolve or change or progress or fail, no matter how great your plot, your story will fail.

Kurosawa was also a master of pacing, a master of building characters and situations so that they naturally built to a climax. One of my favorite themes, as either author or reader, is that of redemption and that is one of the major themes in this story. It is romantic, heroic, tragic, funny, inevitable, surprising. I can't really think of a more satisfying work of art.


These are just a few examples of works of art that influenced me, that inspired me. There is of course a long list that includes Poe, Bradbury, Burroughs, John Ford, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen ... it goes on.

But still, as much as I have always been inspired by artists, it's been the people in my life who have had the greatest influences on whatever creative endeavours I've indugled. But I'll leave that for some future post