When Inspiration Comes from Ancient Things
I love reading the works of early literature & bygone cultures for motivation. While the ethics of the past require a discerning lens, I still see the wisdom we can take as valuable. As a theorist, I must recognize the context behind works, which in our current world, might be a struggle. We are intelligent enough as a species to have discernment into what to inspire, what to view with caution or recognize and inspect for its’ faults. Ridding ourselves of the past, losing knowledge or historical contextual lenses isn’t the solution. We should know potentially problematic things, and recognize for ourselves what space we can slip them into. Only with knowledge of a potentially problematic viewpoint and where it stems can we continue the discussion on how best to modify and adjust ourselves and our culture. Thus, I don’t agree with the loss of ancient things, but their frank inspection. Take the valuable, inspect the bad. Caveat delivered, on with the intention of this article, inspiration from ancient things.
I see an intrinsic liberation in realizing, as King Solomon said, “there is no new thing under the sun”. Our task as writers isn’t necessarily to be purely original, in the capacity of ‘stories never written before’. Our business is the translation and curation of experience. Human experience follows patterns of instinct, emotion, events, nurtured states and cultural norms since the beginning of recorded history, with supposed anthropological norms even further back. While culture and location shaped human experience in differing places on the globe, the fundamental archetypes of a hero’s adventure remain relatively unchanged.
We start the Hero’s Journey in innocence, and eventually through the bends and mountains, we end up masters of ourselves and our domains… or have terrific falls.
Identifiable & communicable. Story itself is one of our most powerful motivators for community and mutual understanding. While I love reading works which give me a unique experience, it is the strength of the emotional authenticity, the characterization and the treatment of the prose, which delight.
In reviewing novels, a host of ‘nobody’s done this before’ comments from often first-time authors surged into synopses, all of which but one instantly connected to a legion of novels I remembered. The authors struggled so hard to find ‘originality’, without inspection of the classics, which created our crumbling bedrock. A gentle nudge to an unwitting inspiration, and the authors fumbled for another way their work was never told before, or fell crestfallen. They held onto the idea of being the first to twist a story, they forgot it is their authentic voice and lens which is the originality behind their works. No one can skip the past, readers will always find connections between one story and another. Pattern recognition is a subconscious compulsion in the human organism.
One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.
TS. Eliot. Tradition and the Individual Talent
The reason I wrote the Judge of Mystics series was to enter into an authentic emotional experience with Caleb Mauthisen, a spiritually confused Judge and sometimes executioner, who becomes a single father. It was a way to connect to the father I imagined, a mythical figure known only in piecemeal emails long after my childhood ended. I know full well a masculine person in a position of spiritual and magical authority, with a child to raise is done by copious authors. Mythology as a basis for retold stories is a genre of its own. The story of a hero coming upon a conflict, and eventually discovering a resolution is as ubiquitous as a god-shaped spray can, or the Vancouver rain.
If I tried to find an entirely original, never-been-done situation for a protagonist, I’d be short up a long creek. A reader would find a similar situation to liken my character arc. This isn’t to say we should copy works, akin to Shakespeare’s rewriting of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy into Hamlet, or Robot Chicken’s many parodies. Likening works to others is inevitable. Copying verbatim is a crime. The line is red paint and body oil, swept hazily in sand. What I can do is write with my own lens. My prose pours with my own voice, and the authentic emotional experience of my version of the quintessential ‘hero’. Or it should, if I write fearlessly.
