While “inspiration” would, at first glance, connote a positive spin, reality dictates that it can also be negative: I am inspired to NOT be like this person, to NOT create like this person.
Growth and evolution – creative or personal – being centered around the question of when to let those erstwhile inspirations go: is it when the gauge trends more towards the negative than the positive or when it indicates neither a negative or postive reaction, when ambivalence strikes?
Leaning towards the latter: a negative reaction – a reaction AGAINST something – can, after all, be just as potent – if not more so in some cases – as a positive. But, another wrinkle: the lack of a reaction (or for that matter, a positive or negative one) to a once-inspirational/influential work/person at a certain point in time doesn’t preclude a reaction – either postive or negative, same or different – from a different iteration of yourself, days or months or weeks or years down the line, via the magic of rediscovery and that holy grail of experiencing something again for the first time – but only with the benefit of a not-insignificant temporal interregnum.
