Читать книгу Stoking the Creative Fires - Phil Cousineau - Страница 14

“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.