German  -          Erleuchtung, Eingebung, Inspiration

In the secular sense of creative inspiration you can be “inspired” in current German parlance in two ways: inspiriert or begeistert. Inspiration is the “same” word as inspiration in English. If only because in his day contemporaries made word play with his name that suggested that his authority had replaced that of God, I will identify the modern German sense of inspiration in Goethe’s earshot. Goethe recorded on February 25, 1823 Rehbein’s pun (after the poet, recovered from a catarrh, was once again able to entertain the group at table) that once the “Respiration” has been improved, then “Inspiration” is in form again too. Speaking in German to Eckermann, Goethe defined the power of Byron’s poetry as deriving from “Inspiration” without “Reflection” (reflection in the sense of self-consciousness). When Goethe spoke of Byron’s genius in English with Georg Ticknor and Eduard Everett, he spoke again, same word different language, of the poet’s “inspiration” (October 25, 1816).

 Begeisterung, which incorporates Geist, the German word for “spirit,” refers to the state of being enthusiastic, in high spirits or, indeed, of being “in-spirited.” There was a time, including the era in which the Grimm brothers compiled their landmark German dictionary, that Enthusiasmus went beyond “enthusiasm” to signify divine or poetic inspiration. A line came to be drawn between the consumer pleasure of enthusiasm and the productivity implied in – that is, resulting through – inspiration. While Goethe already uses “Enthusiasmus” always only in the modern sense of great enthusiasm for something one consumes, he reserves “Inspiration” for poetic inspiration conceived as motivation or dictation that arrives from an unidentified source or power and drives creation or production.

 Both Begeisterung and Inspiration can be used to express the impact of being inspired by some identifiable source (even, if specified, “by God”). But only Inspiration can be used even or especially if the source remains unknown or unknowable. Goethe describes Wilhelm Meister’s heated discourse on one occasion as arising from a “dark” or “obscure feeling” or, in other words, from an “Inspiration.”

In the German tradition, inspiration means the spirit is on the move. Disinclined to identify that spirit as divine or demonic, I choose for my inspiration another meaning of Geist: “ghost.” Kafka, who planned to write an essay on Goethe’s “monstrous being,” and thus checked into the select roster of German-language authors under the God-like one’s influence, broke through to writing he could stand by with “The Judgment,” which he called the “ghost of a single night.” For a collection of essays I edited, Acting Out in Groups, artist Nancy Barton composed out of several portraits of me in the drag of the contributors a “group of one” composite that is centered, however, on the portrait of/as the late Kathy Acker. She indeed inspired me during the time I was working on this corpus of collection (which is always also the work of self-collection – out of the bit parts of the lost objects or our identification). Barton’s ongoing work of mourning (or unmourning) inspired me to write about and with her. But what underwrites our collab of writing and light-writing is the hold the missing have on us and through us. This is, I submit, a take on inspiration or influence that is simply but subtly German – or, to borrow the Melanesian Cargo Cult reformulation, “Djaman,” the language attributed to the dead with whom the Cult members strive but forever fail to communicate.
	Katy Acker

Interview Questions

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Edwin: Who is Kathy Acker.

Laurence:  Kathy Acker was a post-punk writer of experimental prose considered by many as William Burroughs's heiress. Her writing was indeed surreal, hallucinatory, and ribald. More uniquely, she was famous in literary circles for the ways in which she used plagiarism as medium. She saw herself more as a conceptual artist than as a writer of fiction. I interviewed her for Artforum in 1994. By the time the interview was reprinted in 1999 in a collection I edited entitled Acting Out in Groups she was already gone, terribly consumed, wasted by breast cancer.
 

Do you recall  your first memory of being personally inspired?

About ten years ago, just as Cultural Studies was taking off in English Departments, while attending the luncheon for a visiting speaker (a prominent English Professor) who had just finished affirming her first contact with literature via pulp fiction, the Chancellor went around the table asking each one of us which text had first inspired us to establish, in the long run, our current professional ties with literature. No one believed me when I cited A Midsummer Night's Dream. Of course it must at least in part be what Freud called a screen memory, one that distorts an actual experience.

That my experience of high literature was highly mediated (and directed by the superego) is attested by my collection and consumption of Classic Comic Books in childhood. But when I was nine years old, on a trip with my father through Britain, I recall attending a performance in London of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I can still recall as eidetic memory flashes of the opening fairy scenes. The audio portion that stuck with me was the play within the play that the citizens perform at the end on the occasion of the multiple happy-ending weddings. I soon memorized this internal play and enjoyed reciting it and performing it with my puppets. What personalizes and primalizes this inspiration is that I loved the lines not because they were funny nor simply because they were serious but because they conveyed something in between, both un-funny and un-serious (or something somewhere in the vicinity of what Freud considered as the uncanny). I give as an example the following "bite" (no doubt imperfectly) conjured up from memory here today (to this day) in front of my e-mail station in Berlin: "Asleep my love? What? Dead my dove? Oh Pyramus arise! Speak, speak! Quite dumb. Dead, dead. A tomb must cover thine sweet eyes. These lily lips, this cherry nose, these yellow cowslip cheeks --  are gone are gone (lovers make moan). His eyes were green as leeks."