They will see only the accolades and accomplishments, the apparent freedom and the finished products of your efforts.
They will not understand that the person who creates something from the intimacy of their own imagination and places it before others as a gift of the creative spirit stands on the precipice of failure and rejection – or, worse yet, mediocrity – at every moment. That by creating a work of art – a performance, a painting, a piece of writing or anything else – you have, metaphorically speaking, brought a child into the world, and the rejection of a child of your creation hurts you with the pain of a parent watching their child be ignored, demeaned, and seen as unworthy.
These are things that you will come to know if you devote yourself to a life in the arts. It is not a life for everyone. But if you have the courage to choose it, you will have embarked upon one of life’s great adventures. You will have joined the tribe of the dreamers, the keepers of the stories, the shapers of visions and caretakers of the imagination. You will have chosen to set your sights on the stars.
I hope you will choose to become one of us. We come from many different backgrounds, with many different talents and many different dreams. But there is one truth we all share. If we had it to do again, we would choose the very same path.
This is a life truly worth living.
All my best,
Kent
When I had finished my response, I sat back and read what I had written. It seemed good, and it felt good. With luck, my letter would touch Jennifer as Norman Mailer’s letter had touched me and would help her chart a course in life that was worthy of her dreams.
I sealed it up and sent it off.
But I continued to be haunted by the earnest hunger and yearning of her words. That she had reached out to me, sharing her deepest fears and dreams, was both humbling and daunting.
I kept thinking back to a time several years before when I had been asked to participate in a sweat lodge with some Lakota friends deep in the hills of the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in western South Dakota. They were honouring me for my thirty years of working as an ally of the Native people. By sheer coincidence, the sweat took place on the day of my sixtieth birthday. It gave even greater meaning to an already profound experience.
A sweat lodge is not something to be taken lightly. It is a ceremony of deep significance – a religious practice, actually – meant to cleanse and clarify those who attend. It should be undertaken only with an open heart.
In the course of the ceremony in the almost unbearable heat of the pitch-dark lodge, everyone is asked to speak what is in their heart. When my turn came, I said, almost without thinking, ‘I want to learn how to be an elder.’ I meant it in the most profound sense of the term.
Over the years, I had become close to the Native people and immersed in their way of understanding. For them, life is not a straight line from birth to death, with the time of central importance being the years in the middle, but a circle, like the seasons, where each age has its gifts and responsibilities. The elders, as the only ones who have experienced all the seasons of life, have the responsibility of sharing the wisdom they have gained on their life’s journey.
Jennifer’s letter had brought that experience back to me. As I reflected on her letter and the others like it I had received over the years, I realised that the time had come for me to take on the responsibility I had prayed about in that sweat lodge. It was time for me to speak, as an elder and a teacher, about what it means to live a life in the arts.
I had spent thirty years living the life of the writer, and twenty before that as a practising sculptor. I knew the heart of the artistic life – its dreams and fears, its unspoken challenges, and its unexpected rewards. It was time to share my thoughts about what it meant to live the life of the artist, so that not only Jennifer but all the Jennifers of the world – and all those who had once been like Jennifer but had been forced to put their artistic dreams on hold, or those who had come late to the artistic journey – could learn from my experience and have a glimpse into the magic that a life in the arts offers.
And so this book was born.
In it I try to share, with as much honesty as I can, some of what I have learned on my artistic journey. I offer it to all of you who have fallen under the spell of the arts and dream of giving voice to the creative spirit that lives inside of you. But most of all I offer it as a gift to you who are just beginning on your artistic journey and feel the arts pulling on you, like the moon pulls on the tides, and want to know something of what your journey will be like.
To all of you, and any others who wish to have a glimpse into this life that so many admire and so few understand, I offer these words with an open heart.
May they give you insight, inspiration, and courage.
I hope you find them worthy of your time.
THE JOURNEY BEGINS
1
Courting the Muse
Finding the place where time stands still
‘To this day I do not know whether the power which has inspired my works is something related to religion, or is indeed religion itself’ Kathe Kollwitz
‘. . . when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.’ Giuseppe Verdi
I REMEMBER THE moment. It was ten o’clock on a warm August night in a small German town. I was alone in the workshop of an antique restorer who had generously allowed me to help in his shop so I could learn German for my American graduate school. Everyone else had gone home for the evening.
I was standing before an old, battered workbench. A string of electric lights flickered on a single cord above my head. With the streets outside dark and quiet, I was as alone as a man in a foreign country, with no friends or family or familiar language, can be.
On the bench in front of me lay a piece of maple – a slab about three feet long, two feet wide, and maybe six inches thick. It had been given to me by the workshop owner when I had asked, tentatively, if I could perhaps use some of his chisels to try my hand at woodcarving.
I had taken to visiting the local churches and folk museums and had found myself transfixed by the old crucifixes carved by devout peasants and farmers, probably to while away the dark German nights of the Late Middle Ages. The carvings had been so filled with heart, so honest in their spiritual yearning. I, who was in graduate school for the study of religion, and deeply unfilled by the academic dissection of human faith, had found in them a spiritual presence that I experienced nowhere else. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the effect these works had on my heart and imagination.
I did not know how to carve. I did not even know how to hold the chisels. But somewhere inside of me I had a vision born of those many visits to the museums and churches, and of the deep spiritual hunger and loneliness that was surrounding my life so far from home.
With a first stroke, I cut into the piece of maple. The mallet in my hand made a hollow sound as it hit the butt of the chisel. The wood moved and a shaving curled up. I hit the chisel again, moving yet another chip of wood. Then another. I dug into that wood with no understanding of what I was doing. I only knew that something was alive and waiting to be released from inside the block of wood on the bench before me.
I hit the mallet again and again, seeking something I could apprehend but could not see. The wood moved, the block changed; inchoate forms took shape in my mind’s eye.
When at last I was too tired to continue, I looked up. The clock on the wall said 5 a.m. I had been standing