Stoking the Creative Fires. Phil Cousineau

Fates: “There's a thread you follow. It goes among / Things that change. But it doesn't change . . . ”When in doubt about what you're supposed to be doing with your fierce heart, think about this thread. Is it your faith in the divine, your love of family, your vocation as a creative artist or entrepreneur? In this book, I will try to convince you to hold onto that thread as you enter the dark labyrinth of your incomplete work, no matter what your motivation.

       HOLD ONTO THE THREAD

      This much I know. The creative journey is a search for the deeply real. It's a fiery attempt to make real some idea, some vision that is uncomfortably unreal until it's created. The search for inspiration, like Stafford's mythic thread, is neverending. The thread is the force that makes you real—if you don't let go of it. Your work will never be real—realized—until you are.

      Here is a very real description of inspiration given by ten-year-old Nila Devaney, from Arcata, California:

      Inspiration is foolish. He doesn't lie, but he only begins the truth. He is the one who starts the picture and completes the world. Without inspiration, there would not be you. Inspiration is like a candle: the flame of everything, the start of everything. Every time inspiration walks into a new neighborhood, he immediately makes friends with the kids.

      Ah, from the mouths of babes.

      I'm fascinated by those of any age and talent whose spirit has been awakened by this depth of awe and wonder. But I also know that, at the end of the day, it's up to me to pick up the pen or the camera. Over the years, I've learned to respect the deceptively simple wisdom behind folk stories about creativity—like the wonderful legend from China in which an old king gold-plates his bathtub and commands his finest craftsmen to carve upon it fine sayings from the old sages. Each morning during his bath, the king meditates on these sayings, which he called the Five Excellent Practices, in order to rule as wisely as possible.

      The next three chapters explore the first three stages on the creative journey: celebrating the waking dream of reverie, having the courage to seize the moment, and seeking the wisdom of those who can help you make what you once only imagined. Each chapter offers a handful of “excellent practices” or exercises you can use to activate your imagination and stir the creative fire smoldering inside you. As Yogi Berra described baseball practice, “There are deep depths there.” The Roman writer Pliny the Elder cites Cicero as the origin of one of my favorite expressions:

      Whilst they as Homer's Iliad in a nut, A world of wonders in one closet shut.

      The verse refers to an ancient practice in which scribes copied Homer's great epic in script so tiny all 17,000 verses could fit inside a walnut shell. Soldiers could then carry the book into battle for inspiration, as Alexander is believed to have done when he marched to India.

       FIRES OF THE IMAGINATION IN A NUTSHELL

      Your imagination holds news of eternity. Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice. There is a gold thread from your soul to your real work. Hold onto it for dear life. There is a force within you that breathes divine fire and brings your work to life. Honor it at all costs. Give us something the world's never seen before: you.

       Faded Angel. Photograph by Joanne Warfield, 2007.

      CHAPTER 2

      Celebrating Reverie

      Psychically speaking, we are created by our reverie—created and limited by our reverie—for it is the reverie which delineates the furthest limits of the mind . . . We have not experienced something until we have dreamed it.

      —Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie

      March 1986. Late Saturday night, sipping cappuccino in the old Café Figaro in L.A. I picked up a newspaper and turned to the movie section. My eyes fell upon a curious photograph. It was unmistakably a portrait of Napoleon—but it was carved out of a grain of rice and inserted into the eye of a needle.

      After giving the image the old “once-over-twice,” I learned from the caption that it was the work of a Soviet-Armenian émigré, a “micro-miniature sculptor,” by the name of Hagop Sandaldjian, whose first exhibition was opening that night at a local gallery. I couldn't resist the sly wink of synchronicity. This I had to see for myself.

      Later that night, I found myself eyeing the strangely amusing photographs of Sandaldjian's creations on the gallery wall. The exhibition catalogue described the artist as a virtuoso viola player and an ergonomics expert who had learned his miniscule art from a fellow Slavic musician. When he came to America in the seventies, he settled in L.A., but had difficulty finding steady work. Eventually, he began to create what one critic described as his “unimaginably minute worlds within the eye of a needle.”

      When my turn came to lean over and peer into one of the microscopes, I felt myself falling, as if down a slippery slope of metal tubing. At first, I saw nothing but the gauzy reflection of the inside of my own eyelid. Then the gallery walls seemed to close in; my head felt like smoke and my hands like ashes. I groped for the focus knob and twisted it until the image of Napoleon standing on a pedestal appeared, his hand thrust inside his black overcoat. Dazzled, I moved on to the next microscope. This one revealed a grain of rice on which was spelled out in Arabic: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Next came rice grains featuring Mount Ararat, reputed home of Noah's Ark, and an image of Donald Duck made from the dust of crushed diamonds and rubies.

      The Lilliputian artwork took my breath away, which is no throwaway phrase. Japanese calligraphers are known to wait for the moment between heartbeats before putting brush to paper. Sandaldjian cultivated the same discipline, waiting for the nanosecond between his pulses before cutting into the delicate rice grains—a length of time that's been deftly named the “creative pause” by Magda Proskauer, a teacher of breathing techniques.

       Hagop Sandaldjian creating his micro-miniature sculptures. Museum of Jurassic Technology.

       Baseball! Sandaldjian's microballplayer installed on the edge of a needle, 1970s.

      While gazing in amused awe at Sandaldjian's creation of a miniscule left-handed baseball hitter with a red cap, I overheard a professorial man say that those who'd witnessed the artist at work claim they couldn't tell when his hands moved. He appeared to be in a reverie, lost in a wondrous world of his own making. Looking up from the microscope, I had the sense of swooping back into my body, a sense that I'd encountered the work of someone who'd reached into the holy fire of the creative spirit. As Bill Cosby says, “I only told you that story to tell you this one.”

      Driving back to my hotel in Westwood, I was overcome by the reeling sense that transportive art always provides me. I felt as if I'd been gone for a long time, in a strange land. No doubt about it, the planet is bulging with artwork. But numinous art is rare, like the long-lost bronze statue of a victorious charioteer hauled up from the bottom of the Mediterranean. When we encounter what's been conceived in fire, the flames spread and we're set ablaze by the revelation of another world. We're inspired, but not out of fawning admiration. We're moved by the enchantment, the effort that moves us to what St. Therese called “the tenderness that moves words to action,” and the emotion that brings us close to whatever is divine in life.