2023-07-07 03:30:00
The consumption of psychotropic drugs intended to ignite creative inspiration is one of the most vaunted topics in culture of all time. One of the most emblematic cases of this search is found in the famous essay “The Doors of Perception” (“The Doors of Perception”, 1954), in which the great British writer Aldous Huxley turned his creative experiences with hallucinogens, whose concept would later be adopted by the experimental band “The Doors” as a motto of his aesthetic proposal that, paraphrasing it, said: “There are things that we know and others that we don’t; in the middle are The Doors”.
Although I lack any experience in this inadvisable path towards inspiration, I know of other methods, useful for any creative process, be it big ideas or simple solutions for small problems and beyond the discipline in question, which I strongly recommend, since they bring together several virtues: they are free, they are not illegal, they are freely available to anyone, they do not produce side effects and, crucially, they are guaranteed to be effective.
The first of them I learned from my mother and it consists in taking advantage of the moments before falling asleep and just waking up, to reflect on ideas, experiences or problems. It has been proven that creativity is in those moments “open” in a broader way than in other stages of wakefulness. The difference in favor of these moments that anyone goes through daily, consists in proposing to take advantage of those minutes of special lucidity, for which the only essential thing is to have paper and pencil or a mobile phone on the nightstand in order to record everything. that which is otherwise easily forgotten. The worst or, it should be said, the best thing that can happen to one is that the inspiration is so abundant that it forces us to delay sleep or stay in bed to record some fruitful idea.
Another method to meet the muses is as old as thought itself and consists of taking long walks to reflect on issues that interest us. or afflict, as the Greek philosophers already did. Remember that Aristotle’s school was called the “peripatetics” and he himself was nicknamed “the peripatetic”, a word derived from the ancient Greek “peripatein” or to walk, precisely because they taught, discussed and reflected while walking.
A similar method was cultivated by the writers of German romanticism, although with the traditional imprint of that culture, that is, practicing the “Wandern” (“walk”, in Spanish), which consists of long walks in the middle of nature, crossing forests and mountains, whose contact inspired new ideas. Even today this practice is very popular among Germans as a kind of introspective reencounter with oneself, as it is translated by a substantial word of the German language that contains that singular spiritual sensation, such as “Waldeinsamkeit”, that is, the sensation of being alone, in the forest.
In my several years of stay in Germany I was able to see how much of these practices and sensations go back to the Germans to their ancestral times as nomadic peoples crossing the then lush forests of those lands.
The same can be said of the concept French “Flânerie” and its cultists “Flâneures”, which consists of wandering aimlessly but with open and attentive senses, generally in the city. The concept is unbeatable for large cities like Buenos Aires, for example, one of the most appropriate cities in the world for this practice, since the stimuli of its streets are endless.
In all these cases, the method of walking in search of ideas is a practice indisputably associated with the aerobic circulation of blood and its oxygenation of the brain, as well as a stimulating reaction of the senses to the environment.
The last of my recommendations to explore resources that alter the habitual perceptive capacity is to listen to compositions by Bach, especially works for the harpsichord, which are so profuse in diverse and original elements that, listened to carefully, they produce a kind of mental disruption, characteristic of the music of a composer who, not coincidentally, was called by the great thinker Theodor Adorno, as “the messenger of the future ”, since his music produces a kind of disturbing sensation of vertigo in the face of a world of sounds as strange as they are dazzling.
As a last resort, the fundamental thing is to be convinced that inspiration, at least on the scale of what we are referring to here, is not limited to geniuses nor does it respond to magical or arcane formulas, but to the will, the commitment and the discipline of any of us.
The author is a career diplomat
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