Richard Rodgers did not write all day, every day. He wrote first thing in the morning, when he was fresh. When the work hours were over, then he was husband, father, and friend. Listening to his lesser-known songs, hearing in them the same talent that would make so many of his other songs recognizable standards, it is clear that Rodgers took to heart the fact that he was the "origin" in original. In some ways less a person than a place, he met his destiny daily at the piano and allowed the work to move through him, stormy weather or clear.
EASY DOES IT
Staying in Condition
Try this: Most of us imagine that if we had an emptier life and more money, we would get more done. The truth is that such a life invites distractions, and we do much better to work with the life we have. The art of living in the now requires that we be alert to the choices of the moment, that we use our time well. Twenty minutes is enough time for a short walk, a luxurious bath, or piano practice. If we allow ourselves to take an "easy does it" approach and content ourselves with progress rather than perfection, we can find many arenas in which we can take small strides. Take pen in hand. List five areas of your life in which you would like to see "improvement." Next to each area, write a small, forward-looking action that you could take. For example:
Playing the piano: twenty minutes of daily practice can be shoehorned into the busiest life.
You get the idea: Easy does it, but do it.
The day is gray and turbulent. West winds send high gusts through the streets. For anyone, but especially for someone with hair like mine, it is a bad hair day. I have a great deal of very fine, very unmanageable hair. It has always been like this. In a passport picture taken in my twenties, I look like an Irish terrorist. (Why are terrorists always distinguished by their unkempt, uncontrollable hair?) I have learned that my hair can be managed if I invest time and care in it. If I go to the hairdresser, once a week at best, and have my hair slathered with moisturizers and deep conditioners, then it will cooperate and give an impression of civility for a few days. I can use those few days if I need to have a portrait taken or make a speech. This week I am making a speech. Tomorrow afternoon I will get on a train, leave New York, and travel south a few speedy hours to Washington, D.C. I went to school in Washington, back when I looked like a terrorist, and I am hoping for a more kempt arrival and appearance.
One of the things my mass of ne'er-do-well hair has taught me is that there are some things that do better if we don't let them get away from ourselves. Too many days without conditioner and my hair is a tangled mess. Too many days without writing and my syntax tangles too. I write daily, and I do it not because I am virtuous but because it is easier that way, more manageable. Writing is still difficult enough. It is still a steep hill: Choose a topic to write
about and then make a series of further choices, word by word, until your topic is "covered." When I was younger, before I had learned the hair trick, I hadn't learned the writing trick either. In those days I wrote in spurts of fancy, yanking at my prose to get a comb through it once a week or so. Not writing enough, I would begin writing knotted up already. There were too many thoughts vying for attention. There was too much pressure to find the "right" way to write. I would dash at the page and before long tear my hair out: Why was writing such a jumble? Why was it so hard? Why was I so ... stupid, cowardly—the pejorative word of the day?
In the days when women had crowning glories instead of short, businesslike bobs, they would brush their hair nightly, a hundred long, smooth strokes. Those strokes did for shine and maneuverability what conditioners and shine products do now. The application of a little simple elbow grease brought sheen and suppleness. Every woman was her own hairdresser, and well-dressed hair was well addressed by the nightly hundred strokes.
I don't know why it is that we fail to talk about art in terms of humble diligence. So much of making a career as an artist consists of the small strokes, the willingness to show up and try on a daily basis. So much of being good at something consists of being practiced at something so that the sudden gusts of a deadline blowing into your work space doesn't turn you into a terrorist, wild-haired and wild-eyed, unable to muster muscle and nerve enough to simply stick to the page. As artists, we can make our work daily and doable enough that we give it its daily measure of time and consistency. We can "show up" for our artist and, if we do, when we call on it, our artist will show up for us.
STAYING IN CONDITION
Try this: Most of us have areas of our life that require daily upkeep. We may be writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, filmmakers, or dancers. Each of these activities can loom at us large and undoable if we allow ourselves to get away from the doing. Take pen in hand. Number from 1 to 5 and list five areas of your life that require—or would benefit from—daily maintenance. The ritual of a short nightly bedtime story may mean everything to a child. One home-cooked meal a day may mean a great deal to a spouse. The daily habit of writing something will mean the world to our writer. My mother swept her kitchen floor daily. I can put aside ten minutes to clean the kitchen before bedtime. If we don't let our life get away from us, we will have a life more worth husbanding.
Buds
The window where I write overlooksRiversidePark.It is a dim day in late spring, and the park hovers between seasons. It is chilly if you are out there walking. It is seductively slightly green if you are inside looking out. The trees are frothed with the lightest tint of green.
Just like the weather, I am in between seasons, newly done with writing a long, hard wintry book and not yet awake to the fruitful summer of leisurely writing time that lies in front of me. Like the spring trees, I am putting out buds, the promises of future work. My short daily essays are the buds I put on bare branches. If I am alert enough and an optimist, I see these buds and know that something rich is coming in. I am experienced enough to know that the light-green misting promises full foliage and real ideas that will emerge just as surely as the trees below my window will be heavy with green before too long. It is hard, as an artist, to live with the seasonality of work and of mood. It is too easy to feel when each season's work ends. "That's it. It will never come again." This is one reason that seasoned artists like to devise ways to keep gently working.
Today I had lunch with my daughter, an actress. She is finishing a longish run in a well-received play, and when the show closes next week, she faces her first unscheduled downtime in nearly eight months. She has been asked to go to Idaho and do a play there, but
she wants to stay in New York, where the action is. She is too young to believe, as I do, that the action is everywhere and the play in Idaho might be as dead center and important an experience for her as anything happening in SoHo. And so she will stay 111 New York and hope and worry until she is hired again. I sympathize but I think that it is dangerous to let our creative futures lie too firmly in the hands of others, even the Fates.
Creativity lies in the doing and not in the done. As artists, we all sense this but often forget it. Writers need to keep writing in between writing assignments, in between projects. Actors need to act, whether at acting class or by preparing a piece for open mic. Fine artists need to keep their hand sketching. A painter called me yesterday to tell me excitedly about a visit she had had with a master painter and the advice he had given her.
"What was it?" I asked.
"He told me to paint," she reported breathlessly. "Not to paint just what I had to paint but to also paint what I wanted to paint, to paint just anything, anything at all, that that would keep me from going stale and dried up."
Artists who do not keep playing at their art run a very real risk of going stale and dried up. The writer who writes a hard book and screeches to a halt, exhausted, runs the risk of writer's block— a block of time where anything feels easier than writing. The painter who paints only on commission runs the same risk and a corollary one: "I am not a 'real' artist; I'm a hired gun."
It is the
making of art when we feel that we have no art in us that makes an artistic career. It is the pages logged when the well feels dry, the painting painted when the palette is parched, the monologue learned "for no damn reason" that keeps the gears
turning. Ditto for the fine-arts photographer who loads a camera and takes to the streets even though the "real" work is in the carefully lit studio, as calculated as a NASA shot.
Goethe told us, "Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action (boldness) has magic, grace and power in it." What better advice to the playwright who is in between plays with just the inkling of an idea? What good words for the novelist who is toying with a rare short-story idea. In between ideas, I wrote an entire album of children's animal songs and another time an album filled with flower songs—so doing the "slight" ideas we have adds up to longer ideas, often very good ones.
As artists, we do well to be a little like a profligate gardener, scattering a profusion of seeds and not weeding too closely at first. My book The Artist's Way began as tiny essays, the thoughts grabbed on the run before a class or after an afternoon's schoolwork with my daughter. The book grew an essay at a time, a thought at a time, because that was all I had time for and, besides, I wasn't "really" writing—but I was.
An artist moves through life like a thresher. Great swaths of experience get mowed down and churned up and spewed back out as art. Our job is so often just to keep the gears moving, let the scythe of our experience pass across the field of life, let the cuttings be what they are—books, songs, paintings, poems, the passing glories of each day's gentle march.
BUDS
Try this: Put on a pair of comfortable walking shoes. Give yourself forty-five minutes for a good ramble. Take yourself out of the house and onto the trail. It can be city or country; time matters more than locale. As you walk, hold lightly in mind an area of your work that you consider to be "in bud"—the beginning stages. Use your Walk to explore and expand the dimensions of the area you're interested in. You may walk out with the seed of a story and walk back in with an idea in full flower.
What If
The season is as beautiful as a young girl turning into a woman. It has that same mix of newness and ripening. The magnolia trees are budding. The fruit trees in Riverside Park display a froth like Parisian petticoats. It is a day to flirt with alternate lives, with the thrill of possibility, and with life itself. One of my favorite creativity tools is the one that asks "What if?" What if I had five other lives to lead? What would I do in these imaginary lives? What would be fun to do?
My list is always long on whimsy about which I am dead serious. I write, "Be a torch singer." I write, "Be a composer." I write, "Be a flautist." In the life I have now, unless I am alert, music is often marginalized. I do not go to my piano often enough to just noodle. I let my perfectionist intrude, warning sternly, "You'd better be good at this if you are going to try it. ..."
All of us carry an inner perfectionist. (A critic, a cynic, a skeptic, a censor. Name it what you will.) I call mine Nigel, and there is no pleasing him. Nigel is a thin-lipped critic, with his arms folded across his bony chest. Nigel demands to be shown my right to pursue an interest. Nigel wants me to be serious and good and seriously good. Nigel is the watchdog of great art, although I doubt that Nigel has ever let himself make very much of it. He is far too high-strung for mere dabbling and far too self-important for the idea of play.
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Nigel is the one who snorts in derision when I think about starting a new play. Nigel is the one who is afraid to send finished work out—and is afraid, for that matter, to finish work because then it can be judged and people like him do the judging. Nigel was never formally invited to join my inner cast but somehow slunk in like a shadow, slithering through the cracks of consciousness and making himself right at home in the living room—not that he approves of the decor.
Nigel. I would like to lock you out. In one of my imaginary lives I have a virus sweeper installed in my household, and that virus sweeper makes fast work of any Nigels trying to get through the door or in the window. In that imaginary life I wear a small crucifix that wards Nigel off and I chew savory cloves of garlic that I breathe in Nigel's general direction. No Nigel sinks his pointed tangs into the jugular of my work in a next lifetime. In this imaginary lifetime I am an exorcist. I have Nigel handled.
For Art's Sake
WHAT IF
Try this: This is a surprisingly powerful though whimsical tool. Take pen in hand and number from 1 to 5. List five imaginary lives. Be careful to choose lives that sound fun to you. Referring to your list, take pen in hand again and list five actions you could take in the life you currently have to draw you closer to each of your imaginary lives. For example, if you have an imaginary life that says "cowboy," you can schedule a riding lesson. You can buy a book on horses. You can go to a horse show or rodeo. You can explore a dude ranch vacation. You can ride in a horse-drawn cab or pet a police horse. Anytime we take an action that resonates with an imaginary life, we feel better, somehow more ourselves.
Last night, the Jewish Repertory Theatre, housed in the Center for Jewish History, presented Two by Two, a musical about Noah and the ark. Richard Rodgers wrote the music, and the staged reading of the show was a part of the ongoing Rodgers centennial festivities. The center is a modern building featuring postmodern security measures. Pockets were emptied, purses were searched, bodies lightly brushed by a sensing device on the prowl for explosives in the wake of the rash of suicide bombers striking in Israel. Just get-ring into the theater was a half-hour ordeal that everyone dealt with patiendy and nervously: The day's headlines made impatience both naive and politically incorrect. At last, the play began.
The cast was dressed all in black, and the stage was dressed in black too. The only color came from the words and songs, and they were vibrant. The small show sprang to astounding life—and after only four days of rehearsals. For the better part of three hours, the audience was transported first to the ark and then to the world of relationships within Noah's family—the sorrow, the bickering, the disappointment, the love. The show's book was by Peter Stone, and it was a good one. The lyrics, by Martin Charnin, were charming, but the music, oh, the music by Richard Rodgers was melodic, persuasive, full-bodied, and glorious. He had, quite simply, done it again. "It" being tapped into a vein of melody and mined it for our joy.
No one was going to get famous performing the thirty-year-old show in front of a tiny house audience. The actors brought love and not ambition to their playing—or if ambition was present, it was doffed at stage right to be picked up again after the show. Stripped down to its essentials, the tiny troupe was suddenly archetypal—the traveling players who amused European courts and villages, the gypsy vagabonds who traveled by caravan, entertaining as they went.
New York can be an intimidating city. It is full of the best and the brightest, the largest and the top. But it is also full of the smallest and the simplest, the clearest and the purest. It is not hard, in New York, to gather a group of Broadway caliber to put up a small show of the type we were seeing. Broadway talent lives in New York, and it cannot always work on Broadway, so it works where it can.
A friend of mine is a Broadway singer who lives in New York as casually and as fully as in a small village. He knows what is going on everywhere and he gets to a startling amount of it. The other night he attended not one but two events, the first a group of octogenarian actors reminiscing about their art, the second an evening of song dedicated to the creator, dead for thirty years now. Perhaps because both celebrity and anonymity are so much a part of New York, the city remembers. Streets are labeled for Duke Ellington, Edgar Allan Poe, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Apartments bear plaques: "Rhapsody in Blue was written here. In the C apartment line on an upright piano." If New York is about making it, there is a dignity in New York to trying to make it. Since trying is where the vast majority will end up, that had bet
ter be good enough. And it is.
FOR ART'S SAKE
Try this: Go to the five-and-dime and acquire a scrapbook. Now is the time to cherish your art for art's sake. Add to your scrapbook any mementos you have gathered up. Take the time to write a short longhand progress report. Date it and include it in your book. If you have a camera at hand, photograph yourself and your project "in process." "Here I am, practicing my piano," "Here we are at a rehearsal," "This is my trusty typewriter," "This lump of clay is the beginning of a sculpture." When we take time and attention to focus on our progress, we see that progress has been made. We add just a jot to our self-worth. Yes, we are working artists.
Teachability
The man bends over his desk full of dials, taps a few keys, and squints at a computer screen. His expertise is sound. He is mixing a demo—ours. My creative partner and I have done two demos this year, and now we have samples of two of our musicals ready for any willing ears. We have put in long days with this sound expert, Scott Lehrer, and listened as he tuned our work, orchestrating not only the sound of music but the sound of silence. The precise interval of space between songs on a CD is an art unto itself.
Working with a master at sound is a little like discovering that you are color-blind—he hears things that you are deaf to. The normal human ear does not distinguish fine gradations of sound that are large and looming issues to him. The lick of a lip, the slight inhalation of a breath, the imperceptible pop of a "P"—he hears all of this and more. The one note out of six that is off-key jars his ear like a blaring horn: "That bass of yours again," he says. And he is right. What must it be like to hear with such a level of acuity? What must the basso ostinato of the subway sound like?
The Sound of Paper Page 5
