Friday, April 4, 2008

How To Find Inspiration

Years ago, I was writing music for a microscope slide show of the life of a great western saint, St Francis. My job was that the stanzas of his most celebrated verse form were so irregular that one line mightiness have got got five syllables, and another might have twenty five. For old age I was thwarted by this difficulty. Yet now I needed a tune for that poem. I strongly visualized St Francis as it is said he first sang it to his head adult female adherent and a blood brother monk. Legend states us that he had risen from his decease bed and was leaning against a tree, unsighted and ill, but triumphant in the joyousness he felt in his love for God.

When the mental image came clearly to my mind, I offered it up in supplication and asked to hear St Francis vocalizing that song. To my great joy, the tune came to me instantly. It was one that could be expanded or contracted to suit every stanza. And it expressed, at least to my satisfaction, the powerfulness and beauty of the words. How is it possible to have inspiration from a higher beginning when we necessitate it?

Inspiration should be awaited in the heart, then held up to the Negro spiritual oculus in the brow where, my Guru said, we can commune with the divine. A rhythm of energy is formed thereby, uniting the two. Inspiration of this sort is already, in itself, a word form of meditation. For it deepens our attunement with the higher self.

Of the heart, inquire love. Of the Negro spiritual eye, inquire wisdom. Ask that what you make be in melody with both love and truth. Never let yourself to show anything that you don't really experience in your deepest ego to be true. To make less is to cocotte your talent.

Remember also that it is not adequate to have the initial inspiration for originative work. The head desires to say, "So much for inspiration! Now allow me concentrate on the work. "But inspiration is not a motionless tableau vivant - it is vibration; it is living. You must maintain your bosom dance in it, if you would inculcate into your full work its originative influence.