“Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” Ralph Ellison (from The Painter’s Keys)
It’s easy to think art just happens. An artist sits down at the easel and paint flows into something beautiful or meaningful or whatever. This hand, holding a brush, flows across the canvas and a painting appears. Presto! Maybe for some, that is what happens. For others, there may be a down time, a time to incubate ideas. What happens if that down time becomes a protracted period of hibernation? Is it time to panic and give up? Maybe go hang out on the beach for a while? What if inspiration never comes back again?
According to Brainpickings.org, downtime for inspiration incubation was necessary for poets, T.S. Eliot and Keats. The website quotes Eliot as saying, “We do not know until the shell breaks, what king of egg we have been sitting on.” It’s the sitting on the egg part that is so difficult. It could take months to develop that particular egg. Most eggs take their sweet time hatching. They won’t be hurried. They’ll hatch when they are good and ready. What can be done while the incubation is in process?
One can give in to panic or take a cue from Horton, the elephant. Give in to panic and fly off to Palm Beach to lie around on the beach like Mayzie, the lazy bird from the Dr. Seuss classic, Horton Hatches the Egg. Mayzie dumped her egg onto someone else to hatch while she played in the sun. The heck with this sitting on the egg thing! The beach is way more fun. Or follow Horton’s plan and reap the surprise of what can happen when the egg hatches. Make a choice: Mayzie or Horton? What’s it gonna be? You never know what might fly out of that egg.
Here’s Horton and his infamous egg:
“Sitting on the egg.” What a marvellous metaphor.
Thanks! Feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?
Many ideas incubating at the back of my mind but, like when we kept chickens, I can’t always locate them when they are ready for collecting.
Those pesky chickens keep moving them!
I drive my husband nuts because I go off into la-la land or I’ll read light books, but all the time I’m working out all the creative stuff in my head. It’s as if I occupy part of my brain with trivia, while the main part works away on its own until the ideas pop up, usually pretty fully-fledged.
It’s great that you allow yourself the freedom to do that! Your work looks like a lot of ideas are popping up lately! I was just looking at your post today!
Being a non-artist, I must restrict my comment to Horton the Elephant – about the only American book we had as children (the rest being BRITISH, of course!). And how well do I remember
“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant;
and an elephant’s faithful, one hundred per cent !”
🙂
Gotta love Horton! I loved Horton Hears a Who,too!
Nope – we had just the one.
Perth had a contingent from the US Navy during and for a while after the War, and my parents were great friends with a bloke from Virginia. I suspect it was he who, coming across that lone book somewhere, sent it across.