“Really these premonitions of a book—states of a soul in creating—are very queer and little apprehended.”
Virginia Woolf, Diary
What is inspiration? In this radical new exploration of creativity, a followup to his acclaimed 2018 book Time Loops, Wargo builds a case that the aeons-old intuition of artists is correct: that they are prophets, and that ideas that seem to come out of nowhere really do come from their future. Examples of art uncannily foretelling events in an artist’s life cannot be explained away as statistical oddities.
A turn-of-the-century sea-adventure writer pens a novel about the biggest-ever ocean liner, the Titan, which sinks in the North Atlantic after a collision with an iceberg, most passengers perishing because there are not enough lifeboats. Fourteen years later, the Titanic disaster is a nearly exact duplicate of what he had written.
In the summer of 1922, Virginia Woolf is suddenly inspired to write a novel about a fictional version of an old family friend she hadn’t seen in years, which would end somehow with a suicide. Two days after starting her story, she reads of the death of that friend in the paper, likely by suicide.
In 1999, sculptor Michael Rolando Richards makes a sculptural self-portrait of himself as the martyr Saint Sebastian, standing erect, impaled by numerous airplanes. Two years later, he dies in his World Trade Center studio on 9/11.
The examples are overwhelming in number … but what does it mean? What is the function of the precognitive imagination?
Instead of looking at precognition through the more common occultist or New Age lenses, Wargo brings academic interpretive and cultural-anthropological tools to bear on the problem. It makes evolutionary sense for individuals and societies to have some means of transmitting information backwards in time. Prophecy, he argues, is a cultural system, having roots as far back as Paleolithic painted caves.
“I believe that Wargo’s explanation is not only accurate, but game changing. He’s right. If this framework was taught in schools of art (and science!), the consequences would be transformative.”
D. W. Pasulka, author of American Cosmic and Encounters
