rel="nofollow" href="#u8c8b4d68-0125-54db-b665-d17cd3e0259b"> The hard decision to leave works behind
18. Many Hands and a Common Heart:
The joys and challenges of collaboration
19. The Solace of Unlikely Friends:
The wisdom and insight of other arts
20. On the Shoulders of Giants:
The magical bond of artists across time and space
21. The Fist in the Velvet Glove:
22. The Voice that Cannot Be Stilled:
Why art matters in a world of human need
23. The Eternal Youth of the Endless Imagination:
The power of art to keep the heart young
Coda: Expressing the Inexpressible
Art is a spiritual pursuitIt is wrestling with the angelsIt is dancing with the gods
Introduction:
Dreams and Fears
Choosing the artist’s life
‘Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about.’ Rumi
RECENTLY I RECEIVED a note from a young woman named Jennifer who was questioning her decision to pursue a life in the arts. She had a dream, she felt a calling, but she was feeling alone and misunderstood.
‘Is it worth it?’ she asked. ‘Is it possible? What advice can you give me?’
Her letter touched me. It mirrored the doubts and yearnings of my own youth. Though I couldn’t tell her what to do, I wanted to respond.
This is what I wrote to her:
Dear Jennifer,Thank you for your kind letter. You honour me by thinking that I might have some advice to offer on your questions about devoting your life to the arts. It takes great courage to reach out to a person you don’t know because something in their work touches a chord in you and resonates with that private, unspoken place of your dreams. I know, because I did the same when I was younger. In my case, it was to Norman Mailer.
Why I chose Norman Mailer, I don’t know. I certainly didn’t find his emotional sensibilities attuned to mine. His work, though powerful, was not consonant with my own literary spirit. I think it was because there was a muscularity in his intellectual manner that I felt was lacking in my own life. I had just begun a graduate programme at Stanford University, and the combination of the intellectual demands of the academic life and the shock of a new living and learning environment – graduate school, at least at that time, was a far different animal than undergraduate school – made me feel ever further from the living streets and ordinary people where I felt most vibrant and alive. Mr Mailer’s work probably gave me hope that there was a way to be intelligent without being an intellectual, and that a life on the streets did not negate a life of the mind.
Whatever it was, I wrote him, and though I do not have a copy of the letter, I can guess what I said. It was likely very much like your letter – confessional, almost pleading, a lifeline thrown to a person whose life and accomplishments seemed to resonate with what I wanted for myself and what so few others seemed to understand. I suppose I wanted a helping hand, or maybe an occupational road map, or maybe just the simple acknowledgement that my plight and dreams were real and worthy.
I do remember that I asked if I could come to New York and work with him – a request that makes me blush even now when I think of it. But Mr Mailer, gruff though he might have seemed in his public persona, wrote back with gentle compassion.
I have the note still today, written on a manual typewriter and signed with a fountain pen. I’ll share it with you in its entirety because it speaks to the generosity of the man:
I don’t remember my immediate reaction. But I held on to that note like a drowning man holds on to a piece of passing wreckage. I was acknowledged; I was real; I was worthy of a response from a man whose life was inconceivably greater and more resolved than mine. Perhaps I was not going to drown.
I hope that by writing to you I can give you some of the same solace, because you are real, you are worthy, your dreams are worth pursuing. And you are not going to drown.
I know, because I have walked the same time-honoured path. All artists have. We have shared your doubts. We have wrestled the same demons and held the same dreams. And all of us would tell you the same thing: though it is not an easy journey, it is a journey worth taking.
You will live in a world of uncertainty, never knowing if your creations are good enough, always fearing financial cataclysm, unsure if your dreams are more than self-delusion, and vulnerable to feelings of persecution and self-doubt. You will see others with less talent accomplishing more and feel the sting of unwarranted criticism. You will feel angry, lonely, unappreciated, and misunderstood.
But you will also live in a world of joy, with its magical moments when the act of creation lifts you and propels you with a power that seems to come from beyond yourself. You will remain constantly vibrant and young at heart because your urge to create will keep your spirit alive and interested in the world around you long after others in other professions have become weary and soul-deadened in the monotonous sameness of their everyday lives. And you will own your own time, and know the miraculous experience of having intimate conversations with people long dead and far away through your personal dialogue with their art. You will know what it is to work with love.
Few people on the outside will understand