But we cannot learn everything at once. We must first learn progress, not perfection. Too often, we measure our early creative attempts against the masterworks of accomplished artists. Falling short, we become discouraged. We have not witnessed their learning curve. We have seen the Godfather trilogy, not Coppola's beginning films. In our imagination, the early works of accomplished artists must be marked by genius. It isn't always so. Art is a combination of talent and character, and many times the artists who win do so because of their stubbornness. They refuse to take
no for an answer. Others among us, fearful of the big arena, take no for an answer much too readily. The slightest discouragement sends us scurrying into creative U-turns, ducking for cover, lest any more harsh words be said or printed. Part of what the veteran artist teaches is how to survive a career. It takes courage to make another film after a round of bad reviews. It takes courage to write a novel or paint. One of the benefits of aligning ourselves with veteran artists is that they have such courage, and have mustered it decade in and decade out.
Recently, I attended a chamber music concert, a very fine one to my ear. The first half of the program featured a quintet, and after intermission I noticed I was sitting very close to a musician who had finished his work for the night. This was a famous musician, a man known and sought after for his superior sound. Yet as I watched from the corner of my eye, I saw him bury his head in his hands, despairing. Less than a week later, at a second concert, I saw the same musician stride forcefully to center stage and take his place. This was a lesson for me in courage, a lesson in backing down the censor who tells us that every performance must be perfect.
Another friend of mine recently returned from a ten-city book tour where the crowds ranged from small to nearly nonexistent. This was a best-selling author, but not recently. No longer flavor of the month, my writer friend ruefully recollected the empty venues and the toll they took on her professional pride. "Sometimes I would get to a bookstore and discover there was another author scheduled simultaneously," she recounted. From these stories, I took a lesson in professionalism, in the pride of doing a good job no matter how small the audience. Like Jack the show horse, my
friend had standards, a level of performance to measure up to. A career will have ups and a career will have downs. What the veteran teaches us is how to survive them. Over any considerable period of time, a creative career resembles an athletic career, and just as our sports heroes win our admiration by playing through despite pain and injury, so, too, do our veteran artists.
SURVIVAL LESSONS
Try this: Many of us have arenas where we know we need additional skills but we are afraid to enter. The first step in getting help is admitting that we need it. Take pen in hand and finish the following phrase as rapidly as possible:
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about_ .
If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
10. If I let myself admit it, I could learn more
about .
Choose one activity from this list, and allow yourself to be teachable.
Creative Equality
The entire sky is a canyon of clouds. The mountains to the north are bolstered by thunderheads. The mountains to the south lie under puffy cumulus. To the west, over the mesa, stalks walking rain, long-legged dark gray clouds that move like giants across the sage. Directly overhead is a shock of bright blue weather, a small patch of azure rapidly losing ground to the billowing clouds. The weather in Taos Valley changes hourly, and sometimes, it seems, minute by minute. There is an alarming propensity toward rainbows; I've seen as many as three arcing horizon to horizon. Several times, my house has been at the end of the rainbow, and I have needed to ask myself, "What is the pot of gold here?" The answer, always, is creativity.
The other day I spoke to a lady writer. She asked what I was doing these days, and I told her, more and more music, and long afternoons of prose. "Congratulations," she told me. "Music is higher than writing. You're moving up an octave." "Thank you," I managed to say, wondering if I agreed. To me, the entire notion of "higher than" and "better than" smacks of an elitism that closes more doors than it opens. The distinction between the fine arts, for example, and the decorative arts is often lost on me. What makes a Jackson Pollock more valuable or artistic than a hand-blown vase? Both are beautiful, each in its way. Both are unique— why must there be a pecking order? Why must one art form
outrank another? Why must one artist be called an artist and another an artisan?
Perhaps I take my ideas of art more from the natural world. Is a Russian olive, shining silver in the sun, less beautiful than an orchid? Is an orchid, in its snowy perfection, more beautiful than a gray satin river rock? The Great Creator seems to have found beauty in diversity. We have rain forests and the vast sweep of the Sahara. We have maple trees and cacti. We have the rock-ribbed, craggy terrain of Sicily and the gentle, mossy green hills of the Emerald Isle. As artists, we do best to be discerning but not snobbish. There is beauty to be found in a child's drawing and beauty to be found in a Diirer print. Calder can appeal to us, and so can Degas. We may admire both Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. True, we will have our favorites among them, but that doesn't mean we need to damn the others as lesser art. We can have preferences without having prejudice.
America invented the assembly line, and it is to this invention that we owe what I call our "lug-bolt mentality." In America we are urged to be good at one thing and stick to it, to create a recognizable brand name, as it were. In America we are warned not to be dilettantes, as if straying from one enthusiasm to another is a capital crime. Europeans are far more forgiving of diversity. An English writer can, and often does, write in many forms without sullying his reputation. Not so in America. My lady writer friend explains it to me: "Poetry is higher than prose, but music is higher than poetry." Her distinctions leave me unsettled. What of the beauty of musical prose? I wonder. To my eye, some of the greatest artists have ignored distinctions.
David Hockney is a fine painter, a master of the line drawing, and a maestro of the operatic set. He is also a very stubborn man who has been critically punished for moving from arena to arena. Picasso, to point out another familiar example, moved from form to form throughout his career. He had his blue period, his rose period, and that long period where he made whimsical junkyard sculptures from found objects—among many other phases. We must be free to follow our own readings rather than follow trends. It is for this reason that the connoisseur's distinctions among the arts do not always serve us. We cannot afford to take too seriously the idea that children's books or teen literature are lesser than the Great American Novel. We cannot peg performance art below playwriting, or the Broadway musical below Beethoven. We must be free to follow our muse, and often that means what amuses us. We cannot subscribe to the Academy Awards convention that comedy is a lower art form than tragedy and less deserving of Oscar's nod. Carl Jung has remarked that creativity is the imagination at play with things it loves. Play is a child's favorite activity. Young children do not engage in snobbery. As Oscar Hammerstein observed, "You've got to be carefully taught."
A photographer training his lens on Taos Valley today would be hard-pressed to choose a direction. Dramatic cloud forms unfold in all directions. They are all beautiful.
CREATIVE EQUALITY
Try this: Artists are
curious beings. Most of us have interests and enthusiasms that fall outside our declared arena. These interests and enthusiasms feed us. They are good for our soul and good for our art. Take pen in hand. Number from 1 to 10. Complete the following phrase as rapidly as possible:
1. I am secretly interested in
2. I am secretly interested in
3. I am secretly interested in
4. I am secretly interested in
5. I am secretly interested in
Staying in Touch
6. I am secretly interested in
7. I am secretly interested in
8. I am secretly interested in
9, I am secretly interested in
10. I am secretly interested in
Very often our list of secret enthusiasms yields us a topic on which we can happily make art. Review your list. Is there such a topic?
Towering thunderheads loom over Taos Mountain. They are snowy white and showy. The rest of the sky is an azure bowl, vast, hot, and empty. Much of New Mexico is empty. Highways crisscross vast sage fields; mesas and buttes rise above those. It is often difficult to raise a signal for a cell phone. They work only near communities, and sometimes they don't work at all. Many an old adobe house features the addition of a modern satellite dish, a great glistening ear that scoops information from space. It is possible here to be very connected to the earth and its cycles and very disconnected from the flow of human events. The war in the Middle East, global warming—these things seem distant here. It takes an effort, a special trip to town, to buy the Sunday New York Times in order to stay in touch with modern life. That, or the purchase of a satellite dish.
Many times, when we are involved in a creative project, we put a psychological distance between ourselves and ordinary modern life. Our attention is on the novel, the film, the series we are painting. These things loom as large and eminent as Taos Mountain, dwarfing everything else by comparison.
Edward, a writer, puts it this way: "When I am absorbed by my writing, it is in Technicolor, and the rest of the world is black and white." Judith, a painter, agrees. "When I'm deep in my painting, the world falls away. My world becomes the painting—that is all
that matters to me. Minutes, hours, and sometimes days slip past. On some projects, months and years." We live within the weather of our work, and that weather may differ from that of the world around us.
In a sense, left to our own devices, artists can be like cave dwellers, disappearing into the murk of the subconscious, to fish there for images and meaning. An artist's life can all too readily lose its grounding in the outer world. If we allow this to happen, we emerge from our work, blinking and dazzled by the blinding glare of collective reality. Because our inner worlds are so compelling, artists must make a special effort to remain connected to the outer world. While we cannot be as connected as many other people—living with a constantly ringing phone, for example, or the constant presence of CNN—we can stay connected by doing modern life in small doses. Many artists manage their media diet— one newsmagazine per week, fifteen minutes daily of the news at eleven, a once-a-week immersion in the Sunday Times. We need the flow of outer life to both balance and sustain the flow of inner life. Our art is simultaneously removed from, and reflective of, society as a whole.
For many artists, e-mail is a mixed blessing. Easily addictive yet highly connective, it works best for us as an addition to our art rather than as a substitute for it. The danger of e-mail is that in our hunger for connection, we pour out our creative energies into a barrage of letters instead of onto the easel or page. The advantage of e-mail and use of the Internet as a whole is that it cuts through feelings of intense isolation, connecting us to like-minded souls even when we are geographically far-flung. Make no mistake: Art can take us to distant places, to caves buried deep within the psy-
che, or to the wide expanses of distant space. If a reader loses all sense of time when entering the world, say, of J. K. Rowling, how much more hypnotic must that world be for its maker? Artists require careful grounding. We must remember to eat, to sleep, to reach out and touch someone, if only electronically. It is all too easy for an artist to abandon life as the rest of the world knows it, to live on a different planet while right in our midst. Art is powerful. The making of art is so powerful that folklore abounds with tales of the eccentricities of artists: the way they button their shirts backward, forget to tie their shoes, leave their hair unbrushed, and the like. Artists need wives and husbands who truly husband. Failing such connections that remind us to eat, to sleep, to talk, we must carefully manage such things for ourselves. It is best, therefore, not to binge on our creativity but to keep it carefully embedded in the daily flow of life. A novelist may do well to keep bankers' hours. Artists require structure and may often need to build structure in order to have it. A modest daily quotient of art quickly builds upon itself. This is where that familiar 12-step slogan "Easy does it" comes into play. If we work regularly, and in smaller increments, we will work more readily. If we binge on our work, we will overfish our creative trout pond, and then it will take longer for us to work as we struggle to find the images that we seek.
It is a matter of balance. An artist must be immersed in life without being submerged in it. An artist must have enough solitude and enough connection. It takes practice, and it takes the conscious building of daily ritual. There are friends with whom we can maintain a light, continuous contact. There are television and other news sources that can keep us grounded in national and
international affairs. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, is a highly objective and succinct news source, and it is available over the Internet.
Just as the satellite dish scoops from space an astounding plethora of channels, so, too, does modern life offer us an astonishing array of diversions. Overindulged in, the media world becomes toxic to our art, flooding it with a surplus of information and detail. Under-encountered, the world of affairs whirls past us as a dizzying confusion. We can feel too helpless and too underinformed to take our place as citizens. Each of us must determine for ourselves, and in the light of our own creative productivity, the amount and the type of outside information we can allow to enter our sphere. It is a matter of experimentation. Jean, a painter, allows herself talk radio and Books on Tape when she is in the preparatory phases of her art. During the actual periods of painting, she switches the dial of her radio to a classical station, lending credence to the notion that there actually is a "Mozart effect," and that certain forms of music can heighten rather than deaden our creativity. Paul, a concert pianist, finds that he must curtail his immersion in political affairs during those periods when he must practice most rigorously. "I can't afford to get too worried," he explains. "I have to worry about my concert first and foremost. The world needs to get along without me for a few days." Edmund, a novelist, has a theory that most of us attune ourselves to political affairs like the fearful flier who believes he keeps the plane aloft by his firm grip on his armrests. "I have had to learn," says Edmund, "to pull my consciousness somewhat back from world events. My worried concentration on international politics doesn't really affect the war in
the Middle East or the possibility of another terrorist attack. While I want to be informed, I do not want or need to be overinformed.
I've had to learn this."
The vast New Mexico sky arches blue and serene over human affairs. At 9,200 feet, in Taos Ski Valley, a cell phone picks up a faint but definite signal. How we use it is up to us.
STAYING IN TOUCH
Try this: As creative beings, we must learn to tune in to, not tune out from, our environment. When we take the time and care to husband the life we've been given, we are able to gently nudge that life a little closer to the life we desire. Here is another Filling in the Form exercise. Take pen in hand and number from 1 to 5. List five tiny changes you can make to improve the serenity and clarity of your environment. For example:
Make m
y bed every day
Throw out extra papers
Get a letter basket
Sort through my closet and throw away "oldies
but moldies"
5. Use a good enamel to repaint the chipped
kitchen chair
While none of these actions focuses directly on our creative projects, all of these actions help us to focus. Select one tiny change and execute it.
Sudden Inspiration
When it rains in the high mountains of New Mexico, there is always the factual danger of a lightning strike. Postcards of New Mexico like to feature such strikes. The cards are dramatic, but not nearly so dramatic as the event. Sometimes, the lightning stalks across the ridges like great golden legs walking closer. Sometimes it strikes out on the mesa, illuminating a lunar field of sage. Like the rattlesnake, the lightning strike is an ever-present danger. As with the snake, the odds of getting struck are slight—but real.
Sometimes in our creative life, inspiration does come to us in a blinding flash. The bolt of illumination reveals an entire piece of work in stark relief. Information floods in on our startled senses. There is an uncanny certainty and precision about what we see. Like a lightning strike, it is definitive: This is how it is, how it must be. Now do it. The doing of it can be very daunting. Speaking for myself, I have been four times struck by sudden bolts of music. Although I am told I do it backward, the music for my musicals comes to me first—in great, sudden swaths. I race to capture the melodies as they seem to tumble into my head, complete with lyrics. I feel I will never keep up. Sometimes the music comes so suddenly and so fast that I must sing it into tape recorders for later transcription. Always, such sudden storms of music leave me shaken, electrified. I am so "lit up" by the bolt of inspiration that my creative surge can resemble mania and cause people to wonder
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