The Lonely Muse
The subject of my writing can be boiled down to two things: abstract concepts and atmosphere. Through those two elements alone do I get the most inspiration. Since my writing is inspired by ideas and atmosphere, my writing changes based on what concepts interest me in the moment and what places I’ve visited or have been thinking about.
I arrived to this conclusion by spending lots of time looking for patterns in my writing like the images that repeatedly appear, subject matter that seem to point to one or two particular concepts, or places that keep coming back. One thing that I noticed is that I’m not inspired by people. People are interesting, sure. But very little of my poetry actually has living people in them, or if they do, I’ll mention body parts in isolation to the others — a mouth, an arm outstretched, a white-knuckled grip, things like that. More like the overarching idea of the body but never individual people. I’m more inspired by the atmosphere of a certain place and abstract ideas for the sake of the idea.
A great source of my inspiration is my loneliness and feelings of alienation. I’m not trying to be dramatic (though I usually end up being so,) but I know that everyone feels a deep loneliness; if not in this particular moment, they certainly have felt that in the past and will feel again in the future. There are times where everyone has felt that no one understands them, especially in the middle of a crowd. Lately I’ve been dealing with that loneliness on a daily basis — so it often comes out in my writing. It’s something that is the subject of many people’s writings, just like Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night.”
There’s one thing that combines both atmosphere and this idea of loneliness that I really enjoy is looking at, which is blog posts of urban exploration (also known as urbex), or where people explore abandoned structures or areas and just take a lot of pictures of them. My favorite sites are the ones focusing on Japanese urbex, and especially if those places are abandoned amusement parks (I put a link to it at the end of this article.) I spent an hour on this draft because I was trying to perfectly articulate why I love abandoned amusement parks and why I love that feeling of loneliness in that context, but I realized that all I needed to do is to quote from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, one of my favorite websites that gives a name to complex feelings.
The feeling that I get when looking at these sites is named “kenopsia,” and its definition is this: the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet — a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds — an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.
This. This is what I feel put into perfect words. It’s what I love about words themselves. Words have the power to express isolation, yet at the same time assure the reader that this feeling of isolation is not something that only they experience. By expressing personal loneliness, you paradoxically express something universally experienced. By evoking an atmosphere that heightens the loneliness of others, people can realize that they are not alone in experiencing this. So this is what inspires the majority of my writing right now.
Anna Wallace
