Nietzsche, Milton, Handel and artistic inspiration.

You have to be intensely concentrated to produce a work of art. And then, what is going into the work of art? Your feelings are going into the work of art; and, at the moment of creation, you may experience your feelings very, very intensely, very powerfully; they may come welling up from the depths quite uncontrollably. There is a very fine description by Nietzsche of this process. And if anything gets in your way, or if there is any sort of interruption or disturbance, you can react quite violently to that, just because you are so absorbed in what you are actually doing. You are also bringing together into a unity a whole mass of materials; you are bringing them into a unity by virtue of the intensity of your experience and your feelings, or even of your insight and your understanding, and very great, what I call psychic pressure, is needed to do that.

There is one quite famous description of the way Milton worked, in terms of Milton's artistic inspiration being like a great furnace which he sort of banked up and banked up until it was just a mass of glowing coals, and into that furnace he flung all sorts of things; his knowledge, all the materials he had gathered, but the heat of the furnace of his imagination was such that he could melt and smelt all those materials, and he could cast them into a form of his own, into a mould of his own. That is the general nature of the process. This is why often artists and writers have to go away on their own, where they can be free from interruption.

Handel, when he was composing, used to compose very rapidly, in a white heat as it were; he would often compose an opera or an oratorio in three to five weeks -the whole thing- and his operas can last five hours, some of them! And he would shout and laugh, and walk up and down the room, and sing aloud and then bang on the piano, and he would keep it up all day, day after day, just snatching a little sleep at night he was so carried away by what he was doing. I believe Messiah was composed in three weeks. So to be able to do that one must be working at an incredible pitch of emotional intensity and, for want of a better term, inspiration.

You can read Sangharakshita’s thoughts and reflections on:
Nietzsche, Milton, Handel and artistic inspiration.
Nietzsche, Goethe and the enemy.
Nietzsche, Zen and Sudden Enlightenment.
Kant, the Buddha and the limits of reason.
The limits of space and time.
Baudelaire and awareness of others.
Spiritual friends.
Giving style to one’s character.
Anarchism.
Schopenhauer and the will to live.
Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation.
Mozart and pauses.
Mozart and the unpredictable.
Mozart and the concentrated mind.

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Dernière mise à jour:
04 avril, 2007.