“What ‘real artists’ have is courage. Not enormous gobs of it. Just enough for today. Creativity, like breathing, always comes down to the question, “Are you doing it now?” The awful truth is that there is always one small creative act for which we can find the courage. As with housework, there is always something, and all the little somethings add up, over time, to a flow. Courage, after all is a matter of heart, and hearts do their work one beat at a time.” — Julia Cameron in The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
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Blogging is so incestuous. I read David Kanigan’s post from Monday, and knew I had something to say about courage, comfort zones and whacking the scales off our sclerotic dendrites. At least I thought I did. Or I wanted to think about those things. Or my ego wanted to jump up and down screaming about them. In public.
I feel pretty brave. Except when I don’t. Driving out to Artfest in Washington this spring didn’t feel particularly brave. Except when I got home and spent the next two months rapid cycling and ducking from my brain’s suicidal dodge balls. Latching onto art journaling to keep from getting hammered by red rubber didn’t seem brave, just a case of self defense. It never occurred to me that drawing and painting when I used to be too scared to do either might be stripping some of the plaque off my craft.
What really felt brave was buying The Hollow Crown and sitting down to over eight hours of Shakespeare. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so dumb. I listened to the pretty words, knew they were an old form of English, but couldn’t translate them. I could feel my brain straining, flabby gray-matter-muscles forced to climb a junior high fitness test rope.
Oh, but, the music of the language! That was the liniment for my bruised brain. Plus, Great Performances emptied out The Royal Shakespearian Theater to cast these four plays, so all the British actors I adore speak this unintelligible music.
I take comfort that I’ve never read Richard II, Henry IV (either Part One or Part Two) or Henry V. I have no bits of them embedded in my hind brain next to the passages of Romeo and Juliet Mrs. Christensen made us memorize in ninth grade.
And, yet, it feels brave to be dumb, to be a Monty Python Gumby shouting, “My brain hurts!”
Sometimes, being brave means finding the right anesthesia. Sometimes it’s embracing my full-out Gumby-ness. Either way, my art benefits.
And now for something completely different.
A truly horrible movie came out in 1981—John Belushi, Blair Brown, Continental Divide. This was Belushi’s attempt at being a romantic lead. Yeesh. When Brown tries to make him tell the truth, he weasels out of it with a great line that stuck in my head. “Look, a baby wolf!”
That’s the whole process.
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