Inspiration

If you’re lucky, there’s beauty all around you.  If you are very lucky, it’s in the mirror too and you can make a living selling make up or clothes that normal people can’t afford or look good in.

There’s an art to appreciating beauty though.  In the appropriately titled film ‘American beauty’, there’s a scene where a boy shows a girl a video of a plastic bag caught in a breeze, endlessly circulating.  This, he breathes in solemn tones, is the most beautiful thing he has ever filmed.  This, 400 people in a cinema auditorium think, is a reflection on the need for American youth to get out more.  It’s at this point that you realise that any movie containing such a scene must be more up its own arse than a video of a rectal exam.  Anyone who has witnessed a plastic bag on the wing in the wild will know that they are not to be trusted and can attack, wrapping themselves round your leg or shoe and leaving you no option but to shake off said plastic bag by doing a ritual dance that, performed in public, makes you look like a one-man Morris troupe.

It does pose the question though, whether true beauty is to be found in nature, in mankind’s creation or, like a plastic bag in an updraft, in a combination of both?

Picture a new cathedral.  Beautiful?  Unlikely.

Now picture a proper Norman job, the sort that took a good couple of centuries to build, where you capped out the building your great-grandfather dug the foundations for and which has stood sentinel over the landscape for a good few centuries.  Fresh carved, gargoyles and grotesques are probably not best described as beautiful but, after a couple of hundred years weathering, the carving that was started by man is finished by nature as the lines and features of the stone are smoothed and, through architectural botox, a building becomes landscape.

And that’s just the outside.  Wait until you get to the gift shop and tea room.

Or not, the thing to do is head straight for the gift shop and pick up a guide to the cathedral, because if not you will spend the rest of your visit wondering what’s the nave and what’s the choir.  Like being able to name every wildflower in a hedgerow (ragwort, bramble, pornmag, tizercan) knowledge of the correct architectural terms for different parts of medieval buildings is something you think you should have, and feel guilty about not possessing.  Like an ethnic friend.

Places, and people, can be described as inspiring.  The Greeks, early market leaders in matters poetical and theoretical, outsourced inspiration to muses.  These creatures were capricious and could be found in various places, oddly enough frequently attractive places that were quiet and allowed a chap to think about what rhymed with ‘trireme’, or how to found a new branch of philosophy that would get you the girls, or just how to fuck goats.  That last one is a bit of a shocker I concur, but these were less sophisticated times and hanging around in a glade can get lonely.

Muses persist to this day.  Usually they are women.  Unusually they inspire men.  Usually they have really, really good cheekbones.  Rarely do they advise on advanced trigonometry or how to romance ruminants, and the world is arguably a poorer place for it.

Other places where inspiration can be found evidently include the bottom of bottles of alcohol, especially if one is a poet.  And stimulants appear to be a common feature, as, given the number of people sitting in coffee shops with laptops open in front of them with the phrase ‘SCENE ONE’ or ‘CHAPTER ONE’ on the screen, followed by a big white space, latte would appear to inspire.

Anyone who has ever picked up a bat, a ball, a pen or a brush has, at some point, probably been inspired by somebody or something.  It can be a moment of genius or a moment of heroism.

And some of those that have been inspired may go on to inspire others, and not even know it, like the master mason who carved the gargoyle.