Sometimes inspiration hits you, full in the face, while you're sitting on the cold toilet seat of a library bathroom, interrupting the thoughts of actually starting your essay as soon as you finish peeing, washing your hands, reapplying concealer, getting a drink, answering your emails, checking your Facebook, and then finding the right motivational song to type along with the rhythm to.
Sometimes inspiration hits you but doesn't really hit you like a sort of love tap that you may or may not choose to ignore depending on how engaged you are in the current stream of cat videos and pug gifs.
And sometimes inspiration hits you by completely missing you and tackling your friend in a fit of giggles and enlightenment as she starts babbling incoherently about something that you are sure would be genius if only she would stop interrupting herself mid-sentence.
Inspiration has never, however, hit me as I scrolled through pictures of coffee, selfies, and memes.
Oh alright, maybe some of the memes some of the time actually cause me to think critically about my situation, but let's be honest with ourselves: Bad Luck Brian's latest catastrophe with sexual innuendos and his teachers does not exactly illuminate any light bulbs.
Imagery and icons have become so commonplace in modern social commentary that, sometimes, I wonder if people forget how powerful the spoken and written word is. I wonder how relevant the saints and founders of critical, classic literature are in a society so consumed by the fleetingness of time measured in Facebook statuses and Tweets, in Instagram uploads and SnapChats.
Oh sure, we writers have our equivalent of blurry nudes, pictures of pancakes followed by pictures of falling down a flight of stairs because of a preoccupation of taking pictures of pancakes, and the endless reels of scenery that one takes on a vacation because there is nothing more interesting than this mountain that I can't remember the name of but look how pretty the sun is coming up over it and it was so much prettier when I was there, honest. But most of those writers usually have blogs that no one reads (...ouch!...) or don't do well in sales (now you understand the use of the world usually. Twilight is one of the exceptions to the rules. There! I came out and said it! Twilight is bad writing!!!). Either way, it is much harder for a bad writer to get publicity, views, likes, comments, etc than it is for a girl with an iPhone, no sense of privacy, and an Instagram account.
I'm getting to a point here. Bear with me.
This makes the recognition of current and future literary genius important and the introduction of brilliant writing into the mass media crucial. The problem, however, is that a lot of brilliant writing is written by ivory towerists, that is, people who use big and fancy and scary words, schemes, tropes, forms, tones, and the like that make their work so very much high art that regular people like us are afraid we can't understand. So how do we solve this problem? You're in luck! I happen to very good at meddling until things are solved one way or another!
The first step is adult literacy. The United States, as a nation, is pretty good at making sure that children who are citizens have access and means to start learning how to read. These programs can always be expanded upon, increased, made to do better, but we've got a pretty good start. Where we are lacking, however, is adult literacy. To the many immigrants who come here, completely unable to read in their own language, much less in ours, there are few opportunities for them to become fluent in reading and writing in their own language, much less in ours
Do you see the problem?
If the United States can't take the time to teach people how to read and write in the language that they speak perfectly, who are we to expect that they should read and write in a language that they can barely speak at all? And what about citizens, yes citizens of the good old US of A, who were denied schooling, who had to drop out of school, who didn't and don't have access to a decent school system? I'm thinking specifically about rural areas, where there literally isn't a school for miles around and young children have to board in a house two, three, four hours from home just to go to elementary school (I'm looking at you, South Dakota.). And it was only a few decades ago when black children were shuffled through a school system that didn't care enough about them to make sure that they stayed in school and learned how to read and write coherently, not to mention instill them with basic critical thinking skills.
And if the United States, whom we seem to think is a world power, is struggling to promote literacy at the adult level, then how are other countries doing in comparison? Well, thanks to worldmapper.org, we can see visually. Eastern Asia is doing remarkably well at making sure that the largest percentage of their population is literate, China and India both ranking highly. Awesomely enough, Eastern Europe is also doing well, many of their countries in or above the 90th percentile of adult literacy. The United States is not doing as badly as I made it sound. We've got a solid 91% of our adult population literate (not that they're all necessarily thinking critically, but that's a whole other rant.) And, as you'd expect, the developing countries in Africa and South and Central America are in the upper 50/lower 60 percents of their population being literate.
Literacy is just the start. Once we get people to start reading, we can focus on getting them to start reading the good stuff. Here, I will kindly refrain myself from going all English major on you, talking about grand poetry and obscure meanings. No. I don't believe that deep introspective analysis is necessary for people to enjoy good literature, just as the entire world does not need understand the meaning behind Da Vinci's muse in order to enjoy the Mona Lisa. I believe that good literature should be integrated at an early age, and steadily increased the older one gets. People should be quoting love from John Greene's
The Fault in Our Stars on Facebook, tweeting inspiration from
The Heart and the Fist by Eric Greitens, Instagramming the cover of
Truancy by Isamu Fukui, blogging the brilliant imagery in the poems by the mad William Blake. I'm sure you recognize "Tiger, Tiger burning bright/In the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Thankfully, "The Mentalist", an American TV show, used that part of "The Tiger" in one of it's shows which may have tricked several curious observers into classic, romance era poetry without their knowledge.
None of the authors, besides William Blake, are "old school" classic. John Greene is co-owner of the Vlog Brothers YouTube franchise. Eric Greitens was a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan and Iraq. Isamu Fukui is a student at New York University in New York City. These are contemporary greats who have made books that stunned their respective audiences. The written word is not dead. But sometimes, we get so caught up in our selfies (Oxford, I am particularly unhappy with you) and our "filters" that we forget that words can paint a prettier picture in our minds than we will ever be able to see with our eyes. Our minds can imagine so much beyond what the eye can see and words are the trigger to unleash that imagination.
So next time you're sitting on the toilet, don't pull up iFunny or imgur. Look up Tennyson or Byron or hell, even Dr. Seuss was brilliant in his own way. A complete nutter, but there was satirical genius in his books that exceeds the understanding of childish minds and you, as an adult, might better appreciate its layers. Because progress comes from goals and goals come from dreams and dreams come from inspiration and inspiration...can hit you anywhere.
