I am used to being the relative master of my trade. I have put thirty-five years into writing. I like to think—and sometimes think—it shows. In the sound studio I am a novice, a beginner. I cannot hear all that is being heard, and if I can hear something, I have to force myself to speak up, intimidated as I am by the gentle prowess of the man at the dials. "What do you think?" he will ask
occasionally, and I will have to work to put into language what for me are still ephemeral impressions. There is no black and white here, like fixing a muddy sentence. It is, instead, a question of muddy sound, of the slightest differences—or so they sound to me. Something will sound "right" to me or "wrong," but I cannot quite say why. I have to force myself to say, "I like the second take better." I cannot always assign a reason to my liking one take over another. I am in over my head.
In the midst of all the microphones, the soundproofed walls, the switches, dials, levers, and monitors, I have an attack of gratitude. I am delighted with myself that I am willing to be an amateur here. It is a sign of health to me that I have come far enough in my art to know when there are others who can take me further and to be willing to defer to them. After many years of soldiering on alone, I am learning to be a team player and I am liking it. After so many years of closing out the voices and objections of others so that I could stay single-minded enough and single-pointed enough to finish books, I am now inviting input and finding it welcome.
If the first rule of magic is containment, knowing how not to and when not to talk about a project, I am now squarely in phase two, when talking about a project and listening about a project is valuable—largely new territory for me. After years of fighting off the unwelcome remark, I am learning when remarks are welcome—and useful. This feels like growth to me. I have become teachable.
For all of us, it is a delicate dance knowing when to be stubborn in our knowing and when to be open to input and others' knowing. We cannot make art by consensus. On the other hand,
we do not always need to lead, to inaugurate, and to initiate. Having done that, having laid the track out of a first draft, we have to be open for input and improvement, and it may come to us, as mine currently does, in the form of other experts commenting from their strengths with no agendas of their own except good work. If I feel small and displaced in the face of such experience and expertise, that is my kettle of fish to deal with—and I deal with it by being vulnerable rather than defensive, by saying "I don't understand" rather than "I see."
"I don't understand" is not a bad place to be in artistically. Mystery and humility can enter through this willing doorway, and mystery and humility as much as mastery and egotism are the handmaidens of great art.
TEACHABILITY
Try this: The artist soul thrives on adventure. Many adventures require that we muster the courage to be a beginner. That bicycle trip to France requires that I haul out my bike and start riding. That black-and-white photography course says, "Get out the camera; shoot a few rolls." Yoga for beginners requires that I stretch myself physically and mentally. Attendance at an open mic invites me to bring a poem. Life is filled with adventure if we are openhearted. Take pen in hand. List five things you would love to do, if you didn't have to do them perfectly.
If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I'd try
If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I'd try
If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I'd try
If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I'd try
If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I'd try
In Between
It is a dreary, gray day. Spring is still struggling to tug itself forward. So am I. Outside my writing 'window, it is drizzling, and my mood matches the atmosphere—dribs and drabs of depression, a light misting of malaise. What's wrong with me is what's wrong with spring: I am not all here yet. Some part of me is still caught in yesterday's winter, and that chill grip on my ankle will not let go.
For an artist, "I don't know" is the hard time. It is the season between seasons when you are not sure what you are making and if you are making anything worthwhile. All artists go through seasons of rooted joy and seasons of rootless restlessness and doubt. It goes with the territory. If we knew, always, what it is we know, there would be no new land to push forward to. We would do and redo what it is we do—and that is not the artist's life. Ours is a life of invention.
Invention demands that we expand our creative horizons. This is not always comfortable. We are called to write, paint, dance, and sculpt new territories. We are asked to explore new forms, to willingly relinquish the old, safe, and familiar. In short, we are asked to be explorers, pioneers, traveling always toward and past the known rim of our universe.
Right now I am inventing an opera about Magellan. He is a man who set off into unknown seas, sailing west to go east, look-
ing for a strait that would lead through the newly discovered Americas and onward to the Spice Islands. Magellan's voyage cost him his life, although he did circumnavigate the globe. Sometimes, writing about Magellan, I wonder how costly my voyage in pursuit of him will prove. So far, it is five years and counting of writing, and nearly daily another song comes to me, expressing some other part of what I intuit the Master Mariner heard or saw. I do not suppose, working on Magellan, that this is a project for which there are long lines waiting to buy tickets. Maybe there will be, maybe there won't. My job as creator is to create regardless of outcome, regardless of doubt, despair, discomfort. My job, and I do not always like it, is to imitate the season unfurling outside my window and to push on through the gray into greater blossoming.
Compassion
IN BETWEEN
Try this: "Curiosity is the mother of invention," it is said correctly. Most of us have topics we'd love to know more about, but the pursuit of that "more" can feel daunting. Take yourself to a good children's bookstore. Choose one topic you are curious about, say, dogs. Seek out a book on dogs—their breeds, their habits, their ancestors. A children's book is often a wonderful place to start to satisfy an adult curiosity. There are books on engines, books on stars, books on reptiles, fish, and birds. Allow yourself to locate at least two books that speak to your curious soul.
Last night, in a light drizzle, I took a cab across town to the York Theatre, Fifty-fourth and Lexington. I went there to watch a read-through of Androcles and the Lion, a musical made initially for television, for which Richard Rodgers did both the lyrics and the music. My favorite song, the one worth the price of admission, was something sung by Androcles to the lion in which he exhorts the great and hungry beast to have a "velvet paw" and treat him gently. As the story goes, the great cat has been wounded. A large, sharp thorn has pierced its paw, and Androcles can extract the thorn and alleviate the beast s suffering only if the lion will be gentle enough for the extraction to work, only if the lion will have a "velvet paw."
Sometimes, as an artist, I want life to have a "velvet paw." I am willing to deal with the pain of life if it will just hold still for a moment and let me get the first gasp of the extraction over with. I can write about death and longing and loss, and it can all be real as a paper cut if I have the first beat of compassion for myself, a compassion that I ask life to extend to me but that I might do better to extend toward myself. "How brave you are," I might practice saying, instead of "Oh, you coward, look at how long it took you today to even try to write."
I am brave, but it is late. It is gathering dark outside my writing-room window. The lights across the Hudson are shimmering on the water. The waters themselves mirror back the darkening evening
sky I have put off writing today because I am in the beginning of knowing something I do not want to know, and writing will make that clearer to me. Making a piece of art always makes us clearer, more whole, and able to accept what life is handing down—and at the moment life is handing down an unpalatable truth. I am facing down a large lie that I have told myself—and as many others as would listen.
I am
fifty-four years old, twice married, and twice divorced. I have lived for far longer stretches by myself and celibate than I would ever have believed possible or practicable. When I look in the mirror I see a still-pretty woman who looks finely drawn, stretched a little too tightly across her own bones. I look imperious, and if I don't have some humanizing touch in the near future I just might end up being as chilly and cool as the marble statues I so closely resemble. "A classical profile," I have always been told. I was photographed as a young woman with my hair atop my head and my neck wreathed in pearls. In photographs now, I look queenly, aristocratic, and ever so slightly haughty—this is not how I planned on ending up. I wanted to be one of those softer, more sensuous women, like my friend Dori, burnished by touch into looking heavier but still succulent with age. I don't look that way. When my last husband told me two days ago that he had just remarried, I was surprised that I felt not relief, not "Oh, thank God, now he's her problem," but, instead, an onrush of what could only be called lust. For nine years and counting I have held a frosty reserve that I was better off without him. Now, now that he was irrevocably lost to me, I suddenly remembered all he had been to me, the sweet physicality, the beauty of his arm, his shoulder, the bridge of his nose. I remembered the taste of him, the weight of
him, the sheer male animal glee he took in making love. Yes, he was a large man and he had held me, in our day, with a velvet paw. I remembered all of this. Tears bit my eyes and my breath caught. What I like about art is the very thing that makes people fear it. It enlarges us. I am a better and more honest woman for having taken to the page today and admitted my locked-away feelings of the years. I am larger and better and softer and kinder and more open than I was resisting knowing what I knew. It is always this way with art. We say the unsayable and in saying it we name not only ourselves but also the human condition. By being willing to characterize our lives in art, we begin to have the character necessary to make living itself an art. We rise to the occasion that life offers us. I like the woman better who admits to missing and still desiring a former husband than I liked the woman who pretended so well that she was above caring for him since he had been the one who walked out.
Discouragemen t
COMPASSION
Try this: Most of us have been braver than we know, braver than we acknowledge. Take pen in hand and write yourself a fan letter, thanking and praising yourself for your courage. Be specific. "It was brave of you to go back to graduate school. It was brave of you to help your sister through her divorce. It was brave of you to submit an entry to a juried show. It was brave of you to take up fly-fishing." Your inner artist is proud of you for your many accomplishments. Let this letter be a place to share that pride. Write fully and fondly, then mail yourself the letter.
I have been reading books on writing for the past three days solid. I am a writer, have been a writer for thirty-five years, have myself written a book about writing, and I just decided to see what anyone else had to say. The books were fascinating to me, perhaps a little more naked to me than most books, since I was reading about something I know so well. I think I was looking for some new tricks to try to spruce up my own lagging spirits. What I learned is that I already know the tricks and I already practice them.
I do get up early and write in the morning (Dorothea Brande). I do take weekly excursions into the city, trying to see it with new eyes (Dorothea Brande). I do try to tell the truth (Brenda Ueland) and go for walks (Brenda Ueland) and include in my descriptions succulent detail (Natalie Goldberg). Doing all of this and still somehow falling flat brings me back to another rule: Write from where you actually are, not from where you wish you were.
Actually, I am sad. I am lurching through a tough season of overwork and underplay and I am not alive with excitement to much of anything. The world feels like a long wait at the post office, something to just be endured. How did this happen? What became of my sense of adventure? Why am I so discouraged? I think the answer comes back to work, work-related injuries that I have not let myself mourn.
Two months ago, I gave my musical Avalon over to be read. No one has read it yet. No one has called to say, "Good work. Keep going. Good for you." A month ago, I turned in a book to my publisher, and once again, no one has called to say, "Got the book. I am reading it. Good work!" Now, the adult part of me knows very well that my agent is busy and my publisher is busy and we all have better things to do than run around carefully patting each other on the back—but that is the adult part of me.
The part of me that creates is not adult. The part that makes musicals is about seven and is making up a song and wanting everyone to join in the game. The part of me that writes non-fiction creativity books may be about twelve and wanting all the other kids to try the experiments and see how they work for them. In short, I can act adult in my "career," but I had better be clear that why I have such a thing at all is because I am reasonably good at paying attention to the youngster in me that likes to make
things.
It was the youngster in me who got discouraged and went to other writing books for a little company. It was the youngster in me who sniffed, "Oh, they use the same old tricks you do." It was the youngster in me who finally insisted that today's essay be about being sad and hurt and disappointed and to hell with whether or not such feelings were grown-up or warranted. There is always some bullying part of me that wants to say that my feelings don't matter and that I should just snap out of it! That's the part that just for today I am going to ignore.
When I let myself admit it, two months is a very long time to wait and see if someone liked the shiny Christmas present I bought for them. (Surely a musical is at least as special as a Christmas pres-
ent.) When I let myself admit it, a month is a long time to wait and hear how the new book is received—after all, we all have a lot riding on how it goes, don't we? When I let myself admit it, being very mature is not a lot of fun, and it also may be asking my artist to turn into something that it shouldn't: a grown-up. I think my artist does much better at making things when it is a little childish and hot under the collar. I think my artist needs to find friends for its impulsive and quicksilver temperament, not try to cool it off into something more corporate and well considered.
DISCOURAGEMENT
Try this: What follows is a two-person task. You must select your confidant carefully and explain to him or her thoroughly his or her purpose. It is unmourned creative loss that turns into creative scar tissue. Our brainchildren deserve the dignity of a decent burial—and some of them have been known to come back to life when tendered such care.
Part One: Take pen in hand, number from 1 to 5, and list five creative wounds or disappointments. What has made you discouraged?
Part Two: Set a date with your creative confidant to go somewhere public yet private, a cafe, coffee shop, or restaurant. Once there, you will read out loud your list of creative injuries. Your confidant's job, quite simply, is to witness what you read. Do not be surprised if this exercise occasions some tears. Many of us have unmourned losses, and remembering them can cause an emotional thaw. Remember that once your energy has thawed, it is fluid again and available for your use. Sometimes our moistening tears help to resuscitate "dead" projects. Other times, we simply feel a sense of benevolent closure.
Cross - Country
The trees in Riverside Park are in full leaf. It is mid-May, and already the heat of the summer is promised. In just a few days, I will set out cross-country to Taos, New Mexico, where it is still snowing, although spring is fighting for a foothold. Once a full-time resident, now I live in Taos a third of the year. I catch late spring, full summer, and early fall.
The drive across country is a tricky business. I travel with my musical collaborator, Emma Lively, and our two small dogs, Tiger Lily and Charlotte, a long-tailed gold-and-white cocker spaniel and a small, sprightly Westie. The car is piled with suitcases of work, suitcases of clothes, and sheepskin throws to make beds for the dogs. We
drive about five hundred miles a day, depending on our stamina, and then we must find lodging for the night that accepts dogs. We try to travel in the off-season, when motels have welcoming vacancies. Because it is difficult to predict exactly how far we can travel in a day, it is difficult to phone ahead for reservations. Then, too, there is the adventurous aspect of just striking out and seeing how far we can get.
The trip is a study in contrasts. We leave from New York's Riverside Drive with our doorman and superintendent helping and advising as we pack the car. We pull into a narrow dirt driveway and cross a rickety bridge when we get to Taos. There, the old adobe house stands empty, although a stray garter snake may
be cooling itself in the shade of the porch. Last year, there was a shortage of food in the mountains, and the town of Taos was overrun by black bear mothers and their cubs. My property contains fruit trees and bushes filled with sour cherries. These make it a magnet for bears. Bessie Ortega, my eighty-three-year-old neighbor, reported sighting several. A friend of mine, a pianist, summers at a music school high in the mountains. There, at 10,000 feet, the bears are a routine and expected part of life.
It is a good adventure, driving across America twice a year. It divides the year into creative seasons. In Taos, we write and plan. The long days there lend themselves to prose and music. Nature aside, there's not too much cracking, and the lack of distraction pays off in terms of finished work. Back in New York, the summer's work can be mounted and published. This year, we hope to finish a draft of a new book and a draft of an opera on Magellan. But that is once we get to Taos. In the meanwhile, there is the flurry of good-byes, the promise that we'll be back soon, in only four months.
CROSS-COUNTRY
Try this: Adventure is good for the soul. We know this, and yet we seldom allow our soul sufficient adventure. A weekly one-hour Artist Date, a solo, festive expedition undertaken just for ourselves, helps to restore our creative self. A longer and larger Artist Date, a real adventure, brings to the soul a sense of joy and well-being. Take pen in hand. Number from 1 to 10. Finish the following phrase as rapidly as possible:
The Sound of Paper Page 6