Читать книгу The Art of Is - Stephen Nachmanovitch - Страница 10

Tell Them About the Dream

On August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, during the climax of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was sitting on the platform near her friend Martin Luther King. Dr. King had begun reading his prepared address. Seven paragraphs into the speech, Jackson broke in and shouted, “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!”

King pushed aside his notes and began improvising.

His written text did not mention dreams. As he looked up at the crowd and rolled into the rhythmic majesty of “I have a dream,” Dr. King was riffing on part of an earlier speech he had given at Cobo Hall in Detroit but that he felt had not worked very well; he was riffing on bits from the Bible, from Shakespeare, from Lincoln, from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The ghost of Gandhi was never far. Though we can identify the deep roots of King’s words, the innumerable strands and influences had been collectively digested, absorbed, and integrated. The interbeing of many is expressed in the voice of each of us. We recognize King’s courage and brilliance, but he was not some solitary genius spinning “creativity” out of whole cloth. There are no such geniuses. This is what it is to be human: to learn and assimilate the patterns of culture, community, and environment, both conscious and unconscious, and alter them as needed, make them ours, so that the voice spontaneously emerging is our voice, interdependent with the human world in which we live. Thus we breathe life into art and art into life.

Improvising means coming prepared, but not being attached to the preparation. Everything flows into the creative act in progress. Come prepared, but be willing to accept interruptions and invitations. Trust that the product of your preparation is not your papers and plans, but yourself. Know that no solo is solo: even one of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century was helped into existence by a good friend’s blurted reminder.

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