Stoking the Creative Fires. Phil Cousineau

You've got to gather your own “firewood,” as David Lynch calls his movie research, and decide if it's worth the effort to move on with your creative work. If that work is vitally important to you—and I hope it is—think of this book as a kind of old-fashioned tinderbox filled with flints, paper, and matches to help you ignite your creative fires. Every image, story, poem, and exercise is included here for one reason—to spark your work. I promise you that everything here has actually fired my own imagination or proved helpful to someone whose work startles and inspires me. But you still have to learn how to stoke your own fire.

      Innumerable parallels have been drawn over the centuries between nature's fire and the fire in our souls. Ralph Waldo Emerson's astonishing words come to mind: “Genius is the power for lighting your own fire.” If you believe, as I do, that creativity isn't a luxury, but a necessity—a means of survival—then you must ask yourself some fundamental questions before you go on. How important is it for you to express yourself? How badly do you need to leave a mark, to say what's really happened in your life? How critical is it for you to finish what you've started? If it isn't as important as breathing, maybe that's why you're stuck.

      One of our wisest little philosophers, Charlie Brown, muses: “Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, ‘Why am I here?’” In the next panel, a spectral voice answers: “Why? Where do you want to be?'” And that's the key question for you as well. Where do you want to be creatively?

      On one hand, to create is the most natural thing in the world. One of the characteristics that makes us human is that we are reflective creators rather than instinctive creatures. To create means to make something new, original, fresh, and vital. The very origins of the word go back to the Latin creare, “to grow, to make order out of the chaos,” revealing the depths of this irrepressible impulse. But being creative can also feel like the most unnatural endeavor in the world because of the often painful sacrifices of time, money, health, and sometimes sanity it requires.

      The breakthrough comes when you realize that not to create is not to grow, not to emerge out of chaos, which, as psychologists remind us, is to court neurosis. When you make the bold effort to lead a creative life, you must seize the fire, as Prometheus did when he sparked the very origins of art and culture.

       Ravenous (Prometheus) Creates a Human, etching. Copyright © 2005 by Dave Alber.

      But what if your fire is not burning well or, worse, has gone out? Without inner fire, you have no light, no heat, no desire. You can't move forward without spiritual energy. You may be procrastinating or feeling lazy and unmotivated. You may be distracted by money or relationship problems. Or your creative block just may be a blip from your soul's Early Warning System that you're headed for disaster with your current plans or somehow self-sabotaging your vision.

      Regardless, there's only one way out—and that's through the dark woods.

      You must change your life.

       STEPPING ONTO THE PATH

      “Step by step, a path; stone by stone, a cathedral,” my greatgrandfather used to say. I think those are words to live by.

      So here it is, in a nutshell. We create or we die. We make a mark or we leave a void. Our task in life is to find our deep soul work and throw ourselves headlong into it. “There's only one way to begin to work,” Eugene O'Neill wrote in Long Day's Journey into Night, “and that's to get to work.” If you burn with the blue desire to begin, there's no time to waste. There is no better time. “Start anywhere,” says Cormac McCarthy. There will never be a perfect moment when the stars are aligned, the money is in the bank, the kids are out of the house, and the muses are just a speed-dial away. What's important is to commit to your own creative process. The journey is about making time and space to make your art.

      Think about where you want to be a year from now, five years, ten years from now. Consider what you have to do to reach that goal. Put skin and bones on that dream creature called your creative vision. If you believe, along with Doc, the soulful marine biologist in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, that “We have to make a mark, even if it's only a scribble,” then it's time to make yours and not worry about success, or fame, or riches.

      Are you up to the challenge? Are you going to be a reproduction or an original? Will you strive to be innovative or imitative? Are you ready to take your turn on the page, turn up the heat, turn it on? “Wanna make something out of it?” as we used to taunt on the streets of Detroit. “Do you want to make something out of yourself?” as Roger Turner, my first newspaper editor, used to challenge me. Are you ready to create something that enlivens and enlarges your world and—if it's got the real fire—ours too?

       Silhouettes. Sunprint by Jack Cousineau, 2005.

      “A musician must make music,” wrote Abraham Maslow, “an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must.” In that spirit, the creative journey is the one you can't not take, the work you can't not do. But it takes courage to live boldly, a bold heart to become yourself. If you're stuck, you must move. To fuel the journey, to rekindle your love of the work, to make this leap of faith requires extraordinary energy. For creativity is love's work. If you don't love it, it won't work. And if it won't work, then it's time to stoke the fire.

      One night, not long ago, as I was finishing this book, I awoke at dawn with a start. A peculiar dreamline hovered in my mind: “There is a reason you're creative for a reason.” I have no idea what this means, other than it's a message from my very soul that there is more meaning and purpose to my fierce desire to make works of art than I'd ever imagined. I don't have to understand why, but I do have to believe in the creative spark that burns within me.

      PART I

      Inspiration

      And then there is inspiration. Where does it come from? Mostly from the excitement of living. I get it from the diversity of a tree or the ripple of the sea, a bit of poetry, the sighting of a dolphin breaking the still water and moving toward me, anything that quickens you to the instant. And whether one would call this inspiration or necessity, I really do not know.

      —Martha Graham, Blood Memories

       Casa Grande Ruins. Infrared photograph by Phil Cousineau, 2006.

       Uroboros, medieval symbol of circularity, eternity, and self-knowledge. From Horapollio's Selecta Hieroglyphica, 1597.

      CHAPTER 1

      Fires of the Imagination

      The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

      —Auguste Rodin

      Inspiration is a flash of fire in the human soul. Consider the marvel: the inrush of spirit, the flash of an idea, the flame of insight, the spark of imagination. It's the Aha, Eureka, and Hallelujah moment all rolled into one. Inspiration is a message-in-a-bottle