Treatise on Inspiration (significance)

Meaning comes from the audience. So, the job of the creator is not to put across a message, since this message will normally be misconstrued by different audiences and end up meaning entirely different things to different people (just look at the Bible...) The really good creator will aim to create something from which the maximum number of meanings can be drawn. And the quality of these meanings is determined by how significant they feel to the audience which draws them.

As an example, I will take the Coopers again, because they demonstrate my point precisely. If you write a song called "the same mistakes", then, when a lover listens to it, he'll think about his romantic history; when a politician listens to it, he'll think grand thoughts about the democratic process he has conspired against; when a philosopher thinks about it, he'll draw conclusions about the nature of humankind. Whereas, if you write a song called "anarchy in the UK", a certain (small) percent of people will become fanatics, while the majority gets nothing from your work at all. In the first instance, you have been the causation for hundreds of excellent new ideas across every type of individual, while in the second, you've been the causation for one new idea in one type of person. For followers of inspiration, this is a very important lesson.

As audience, we should always strive to be inspired and emulate what inspires us.

As creator, we should always strive to inspire others.

Now for my suggestion that "the quality of these meanings is determined by how significant they feel to the audience which draws them". This is why ambiguity is such an important tool in the creator's toolbox. The best kind of writing is the writing which says very little, but suggests an awful lot. If you can conjure images and feelings, then the appropriate meanings will follow. And the more ambiguous and suggestive the writing is, the deeper these meanings will be.