Artistic inspiration during lockdown?

“The cause of plagues is sin, and the cause of sin is plays.”

A preacher in Elizabeth England, possibly in response to Shakespeare’s plays.

Bloody brilliant, I say. The highest praise you can give a writer is to tell them that their writing caused the latest plague. Don’t tell the conspiracy theorists though…that is a whole other labyrinth of madness.

One of my friends texted me last week and asked me if she had properly signed up to this blog. She wasn’t getting any blog notifications, she said. I had to inform her that it was because I wasn’t writing content that was in a shareable state. And it is true that there is always a writer’s draft and then there is a reader’s draft.

But I haven’t been writing publicly because the content of my journals would read like a Live Journal circa 2003 and I really don’t want to drag others down into my personal mire of malaise. Despair is probably a more accurate word.

One of the myths around creative practice is that creative types ‘need’ depression to activate the creative juices. I call B.S. There is a relationship between the extremes of emotion and creativity, but I think the causation is reversed. Creative life helps us with despair, and not the other way around.

Another friend told me that her daughter, also a writer, is struggling with inspiration at the moment. Inspiration often comes from observing life around you, by sitting in a coffee shop and listening, for example. Inspiration comes from immersing yourself in the ebb and flow of life. At the moment, life is certainly not flowing for us in Australia.

Lockdown is a unique crisis in that we are forced to experience it in isolation. One of my Melbourne friends, when I asked her how she has coped with a prolonged lockdown, said “Look, I tell myself that all the government wants me to do is stay at home. I can do that. It’s not like they want me to fight a war in Europe or anything.” I also have friends who’ve lost generations of family members in South America. Compared to such loss, staying at home seems like a simple ask.

But as human mammals, primed for interaction, lockdown has severe implications for those of us living on our own. The chattering mind is a dangerous place to be lost in. And for a writer, stream of conscious writing died with the Modernists. So what is the answer when we are starved of inspiration?

Seek comfort rather than inspiration, is my answer. If it means reading fantasy or improbable crime fiction, than so be it. If it means taking photos of flowers on your android with an Instagram filter and calling it ‘high art’, then so be it.

And maybe there’s a case for accepting bleakness and writing through the bleak. Apparently, Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the bubonic plague, and if I’m honest, who doesn’t love a tragedy with a bit of eye gouging? 300 years prior Boccaccio wrote The Decameron during the black plague in Italy. In full disclosure, I am still on page 3 of the book, but I’ve been told that out of bleak can come the bawdy and the tragi-comic.

Because really, if you follow the bleakness through to its logical conclusion, we encounter a bit of lightness, a glimmer of hope and a large slathering of absurdity.