Nonsense is a pretty common theme in life at the best of times. As humans there are a lot of behaviours and norms that can always be attributed to nonsense, on account of there being little reasoning behind most of what we do. Of course there's fabricated reasoning if you look at absolute universal truths and it's entirely subjective to what you believe, but even this subjectivity could be seen as lacking in sense.
It seem that what separates us from other animals, is the need to find some kind of reason for our existence. Sometimes I look at my cat and wonder whether she is aware of her existence, or oblivious to the wider world around her. Either is plausible, but as humans we often shy away from the meaningless and try to assign meaning to everything we encounter. This is not to say that failing to do so is nihilistic or fatalist, rather that we fail to find meaning in the mundane unless we jazz it up a little.
We're speaking generally here, so don't go rolling those eyes already, but these are the thoughts that motivate creation for me.
There's a beat writer saying of "first thought, best though", which has always stuck with me. It eschews the need for editing and adjusting creations to try and produce the ultimate result. The first spark of creativity is arguably the purest, and we get in the way by drafting and editing the result of that spark. Can we actually improve on ethereal inspiration? My interpretation of this saying is that maybe we shouldn't always be so keen to adapt and improve on something so pure and elegant.
Bring that back to the page and it's the reason why I don't spend a lot of time working on ideas, unless I think it has legs. More often than not, I prefer to draw a simple representation of a thought, so that the spark is captured. Maybe these ideas will be developed into paintings or more detailed pieces, but the real priority is to capture the thought before it's lost.
Some of my favourite pieces have come from such a thought and still remain close to the original doodle I made to remember it by. There's an honesty and truth to the process that can be extremely satisfying.
I mean, if we are trying to find some sort of universal truth, then we would be arrogant to think that we can edit and improve that truth away from its natural state. These are the tasks of the gods and should be left to those with divine power instead of mere mortals.
Let's not be down on the extended process of work and development though. There's immense value in spending the time to hone a craft and some of the greatest works of art have taken incredible amounts of time and iteration to accomplish. However, I would argue that this time is largely tied to the technical execution of an idea, rather than editorialising inspiration. Without taking the time to practice and improve on skills, there will always be a limit to how flexible we can be when bringing thought to life.
It's not thought that needs to change, it's us.
If we really want to discover the universal truth of existence, we need to get out of our own way to let all possibilities flow through us. A musician learns their instrument so that the music can flow through them without getting blocked by amateur technical skill.
Some would argue that brute force can allow for masterful creation, and I would agree to an extent. If we all practiced a skill enough to master it, then we would be capable of producing highly polished works that could be admired for their existence, even if they were made without inspiration.
It makes me think of incredible guitar players who are fast and technical with their skill, but every solo sounds the same. The true masters of the guitar don't rely on speed to impress their audience, they write elegant progressions that speak acutely to the music they are playing. In my opinion the same is true for all forms of creativity, and even life itself.
We all need skill to translate thought into action and make the transfer from an ethereal source of inspiration to a physical manifestation, but one should never be at the expense of the other. In fact, without retaining the purity and truth embedded in that initial spark of the idea, there isn't much to go on at all.