Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Creativity 315
instantly; the uneducated mathematical genius, Ramanujan said that his genius came in dreams
from a goddess named Namagiri. Brahms said that the inspiration for his music flowed into
him from God, and that he could see them in his mind’s eye. The inspirations arrived in the
following.
The Inspiration of Nature. The inspiration of nature, of trees, brooks, skies, birds, and
other flora and fauna is a well-known venue for breathtaking writing. The poets of the T’Ang
Dynasty of eighth century China influenced countless modern poets with their natural scene
setting. The English romantics used nature as inspiration, and decried the industrial revolution as
in Wordsworth’s sonnet, “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers; / Little we see in nature that is ours.”
To grow dizzy from contemplation and in-taking of natural glories is so commonplace in
the creative process that it almost goes unnoticed. What causes youngsters to want to become
scientists, especially biologists? The inspiration of nature. What inspires Sunday painters to
stand by the seashore dabbing away? The inspiration of nature. Surely nature inspired the art of
Audubon, the books of Roger Tory Peterson, and the musical compositions of Jean Sibelius.
Inspiration through Substances. The use of substances—alcohol, drugs, herbs—has a long
and respectable reputation within the literature on the creative process in writers, artists, and
others. Aldous Huxley wrote about the influence of mescaline; Samuel Taylor Coleridge about
the influence of opium; Jack Kerouac about amphetamines; Edgar Allen Poe about absinthe; the
seventh-century Chinese Zen poet Li Po about wine; Fyodor Dostoevsky about whiskey; Allen
Ginsberg about LSD; Michael McClure about mushrooms, peyote, and also about heroin and
cocaine.
The list of substances used could go on and on. The altered mental state brought about by
substances has been thought to enhance creativity—to a certain extent. The partaker must have
enough wits about self to descend into the abyss to reap what is learned there, but to also be able
to return and put it aside. The danger of turning from creative messenger to addicted body is
great, and many creators have succumbed, especially to the siren song of alcohol.
After taking drugs, Allen Ginsberg had a vision of William Blake. “I had the impression of the
entire universe as poetry filled with light and intelligence and communication and signals. Kind
of like the top of my head coming off, letting in the rest of the universe connected to my own
brain.” Ginsberg viewed the initial vision as the most important, most genuine experience he ever
had, and he spent many years trying to recapture it through drugs and meditation.
Inspiration by Others’ Creativity, Especially Works of Art and Music. Many creators are
inspired by others’ creativity, especially by works of art and music produced by other artists.
Art inspires. Music also inspires. Friendships between artists of different genres abound in
biographical literature.
Artist Juan Miró described his neighborhood in Paris on Blomet Street from 1921 to 1927.
He said that Blomet Street was a crucial place at a crucial time for him. The street represented
friendship and a lofty exchange of ideas and discoveries among a superior group of creative
people. Miró and his friends listened to music, talked, drank, and were poor struggling artists
together. They also read Rimbaud and Lautreamont, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Other friends
included writer Antonin Artaud, visual artists Jean Dubuffet and Juan Gris, and surrealists Andre
Breton and Paul Eluard. His friend Ernest Hemingway bought his major breakthrough painting,
“The Farm.”
Thinkers and scholars routinely get inspiration from reading the works of others. French
philosopher Michel Foucault found inspiration for his work The Order of Things in the works
of Argentine playwright and novelist Jorge Luis Borges, who was making up an incongruous
classification of animals from a fictional Chinese encyclopedia. Borges’s audacious invention of
this reference work inspired Foucault to consider the very nature of taxonomies, which to him