The Algebra of the Aha Moment

The Craft was my stepladder to High Art, and Algebra—my tool to measure Harmony.

— Salieri, from Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri

When Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s haunted, gaunt Salieri looked out from our black-and-white Soviet television and asked two questions—Can harmony be grown through algebra? Can genius and evil coexist?—I didn’t know they would stay with me for the rest of my life. The genius–evil question still drifts from the rafters of my consciousness, until I shoo it away. The method-to-inspiration question has become the continuous hum of my professional engine.

Even apparent geniuses left methodological traces. Mozart’s process remains elusive, but da Vinci accumulated thousands of pages on the material universe; Shakespeare devoured Plutarch, historical chronicles, old maps, and shepherds’ almanacs. For those who work daily in art, theater, and writing, inspiration is not the mysterious visitation of a scantily clad muse in a floating Doric chiton; it is simply the last visible step of an organized process.

As a costume designer, theater director, and professor for the past 11 years, I’ve tested this idea using Stanislavsky’s “method”: a system that allows actors to have reproducible “lived-in” experiences onstage through consecutive steps. There is an early, manic, word-hungry Stanislavsky, with actors embarking on dizzyingly long table reads, gnawing on every word and motivation. His breakthrough came when he integrated those intellectual fundamentals with the actor’s body as a tool of exploration: movement, senses, unpredictable reactions. Neither pole was enough by itself; the accumulation of both led to a metamorphosis of the creative process. And I realized: this structure works for writing too.

Another key ingredient is often misconstrued: Stanislavsky discouraged using one’s own psyche and personal experience as the sole resource. While it offers a portal to understanding character, the wealth of acquired material is what gives an interpretation its weight, coloring, and depth. His concept of “given circumstances” requires thorough exploration of the social, historical, and material conditions of a play; action and psychology grow out of that constructed world.

I often return to Akhmatova’s line: “If only you knew from what debris the poems grow.” The Russian word for debris, сор, is not landfill trash but residue, scraps, unfiltered and uncategorized material. In theater and opera, this looks like weeks of research. My initial PowerPoints usually run 100–150 pages. Everything goes: old eBay photographs, ancient recipes, online museum collections, Facebook feeds. Each new play sends me on a different travel itinerary. Once the archive is dense enough, the connections begin to appear almost of their own accord (much like mice in old bedsheets, according to some folk beliefs).

The workshop I call The Algebra of the Aha Moment demonstrates how this method works. For our laboratory, I chose the events surrounding the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii; like Pliny the Elder, I am drawn to natural disasters. (Pushkin again: “All that deathly looms / delights the mortal heart with tokens of immortality.”) We begin with Pliny the Younger’s letters describing the eruption and his uncle’s death, reading them not for the sensational outcome but for usable data: the umbrella-pine cloud, pillows tied to heads for protection, the changing wind, the soundscape. Then we build a sensory grid and assemble enclaves of sensory information. The aim is to accumulate enough ingredients that personal experience begins to weave itself through them.

Try This

1. Intellectual component
   Find a short historical account of a crisis (a letter, diary entry, report). On a separate page, list who is present, where it takes place, when it happens, and concrete physical details: objects, surfaces, positions, movement. These are your anchors, the doors into the material. Then write 10–12 lines using only this material, especially the parts that hooked you.
2. Sensory grid
   Make four or five categories: colors, sounds, textures, smells. Gather these as images, videos, and sound recordings when possible, rather than descriptions. Some elements persist across time. For Pompeii: wind through dry grasses, cicadas, flickering embers from dying fires, sounds of birds, the smell of freshly baked bread. These haven’t changed in 2,000 years. Choose one item from each category and pair them randomly, like a blind date. See if there’s chemistry. The absence of logical connection is the point.
3. Peripheries and side lighting
   Choose a marginal figure from your historical source: a servant, a child, a cat, wine fermenting in a jar. Approach the story from their point of view: what they smell, hear, reach for.
4. Experiment with foreign sound
   Listen to recordings in languages related to your chosen setting: Latin for ancient Rome, Middle English for medieval England, Classical Greek for Homeric worlds. You don’t need translation. Listen for the music, the rhythm, how the syllables hit. Let those permeate into your English lines. The way a language sounds might tell you something about the world it comes from.
5. Let it sit!
   Let the material rest. It needs to breathe while you start noticing ancient Rome (or Greece, or 17th-century Venice, or the trenches of Verdun) everywhere.

As poets, we often write from our own real-life experiences. But it doesn’t have to be monodrama or confessional writing based solely on one life. Many poets I admire work from dense archives of history and myth: Joseph Brodsky, Carl Phillips, Anne Carson, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Ishion Hutchinson, Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Some have formal classical training. Carson earned her PhD in classics at Toronto; Phillips studied Greek and Latin at Harvard; Graham studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Their poems are layered histories illuminated by personal experience but not staged in their kitchens.

One does not need a PhD or to learn Latin and ancient Greek to feel at home among ruins, gods, and lost cities. If you accumulate enough specific information, your brain eventually reorganizes itself around that material. What feels like “simultaneous combustion” on the page is the moment when accumulated details reach critical mass and ignite into form.

Shortly after first teaching this workshop, I tested this architecture on my own practice. Over a couple of weeks I placed myself inside that alternative reality of Pompeii before the eruption and wrote one of my favorite  poems, “Metamorphoses.” I cannot share it yet in full (it’s currently in submission), but here is the opening:

Harvest's good this year; olives in every crevice—
amphorae, pots, baskets, even an old crib—little green pebbles
spilling, biting the unsuspecting sole like tiny demons. Tonight
Marcus will bring a lyre-player and dancers;
bread from Popidius, fish in garlic and thyme sauce,
fig balls, cheese—life is good in Pompeii,
better than Rome. I'd never live there;
they huddle in storeyed buildings like shipworms.
I don't need the Colosseum if I must wade
through filth and mud to reach it.
I need the sea…

The poem arrived once the algebraic work was done. I was so delighted at its arrival I forgot it wasn't spontaneous. The poem did not care either it was precalculated—it was breathing on its own.