The Artist's Way (10 page)

A
NGER IS FUEL
. We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards. But we are
nice
people, and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it. We do everything but
listen
to it.

Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a
map.
Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we've been and lets us know when we haven't liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.

Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction. We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

“Blast him! I could make a better film than that!” (This anger says: you want to make movies. You need to learn how.)

“I cant believe it! I had this idea for a play three years ago, and she's gone and written it.” (This anger says: stop procrastinating. Ideas don't get opening nights. Finished plays do. Start writing.)

“That's my strategy he's using. This is incredible! I've been ripped off! I knew I shoud have pulled that material together and copyrighted it.” (This anger says: it's time to take your own ideas seriously enough to treat them well.)

When we feel anger, we are often very angry
that
we feel anger. Damn anger!! It tells us we can't get away with our old life any longer. It tells us that old life is dying. It tells us we are being reborn, and birthing hurts. The hurt makes us angry.

Anger is the firestorm that signals the death of our old life. Anger is the fuel that propels us into our new one. Anger is a tool, not a master. Anger is meant to be tapped into and drawn upon. Used properly, anger is
use-f.

Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not. Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves. It will always tell us that it is time to act in our own best interests.

Anger is not the action itself. It is action's invitation.

Answered prayers are scary. They imply responsibility. You asked for it. Now that you've got it, what are you going to do? Why else the cautionary phrase “Watch out for what you pray for; you just might get it”? Answered prayers deliver us back to our own hand. This is not comfortable. We find it easier to accept them as examples of synchronicity:

• A woman admits to a buried dream of acting. At dinner the next night, she sits beside a man who teaches beginning actors.
  
• A writer acknowledges a dream to go to film school. A single exploratory phone call puts him in touch with a professor who knows and admires his work and promises him that the last available slot is now his.
  
• A woman is thinking about going back to school and opens her mail to find a letter requesting her application from the very school she was thinking about going to.
  
• A woman wonders how to rent a rare film she has never seen. She finds it at her neighborhood
  bookstore
  two days later.
  
• A businessman who has secretly written for years vows to himself to ask a professional writer for a prognosis on his talent. The next night, over a pool table, he meets a writer who becomes his mentor and then collaborator on several successful books.
  

It's my experience that we're much more afraid that there might be a God than we are that there might not be. Incidents like those above happen to us, and yet we dismiss them as sheer coincidence. People talk about how dreadful it would be if there were no God. I think such talk is hooey. Most of us are a lot more comfortable feeling we're not being watched too closely.

If God—by which I do not necessarily mean a single-pointed Christian concept but an all-powerful and all-knowing force—does not exist, well then, we're all off the hook, aren't we? There's no divine retribution, no divine consolation. And if the whole experience stinks—ah well. What did you expect?

That question of expectations interests me. If there is no God, or if that God is disinterested in our puny little affairs, then everything can roll along as always and we can feel quite justified in declaring certain things impossible, other things unfair. If God, or the lack of God, is responsible for the state of the world, then we can easily wax cynical and resign ourselves to apathy. What's the use? Why try changing anything?

This is the use. If there is a responsive creative force that
does hear us and act on our behalf, then we may really be able to do some things. The jig, in short, is up: God knows that the sky's the limit. Anyone honest will tell you that possibility is far more frightening than impossibility, that freedom is far more terrifying than any prison. If we do, in fact, have to deal with a force beyond ourselves that involves itself in our lives, then we may have to move into action on those previously impossible dreams.

Life is what we make of it. Whether we conceive of an inner god force or an other, outer God, doesn't matter. Relying on that force does.

“Ask and you shall receive. Knock and it shall be opened to you….” These words are among the more unpleasant ones ascribed to Jesus Christ. They suggest the possibility of scientific method: ask (experiment) and see what happens (record the results).

Is it any wonder we discount answered prayers? We call it coincidence. We call it luck. We call it anything but what it is—the hand of God, or good, activated by our own hand when we act in behalf of our truest dreams, when we commit to our own soul.

Even the most timid life contains such moments of commitment: “I will get a new love seat after all!” And then, “I found the perfect one. It was the strangest thing. I was at my Aunt Bernice's and her neighbor was having a garage sale and she had this wonderful love seat her new husband was allergic to!”

In outsized lives, such moments stand out in bas-relief, large as Mount Rushmore: Lewis and Clark headed west. Isak Dinesen took off for Africa. We all have our Africas, those dark and romantic notions that call to our deepest selves. When we answer that call, when we commit to it, we set in motion the principle that C. G. Jung dubbed
synchronicity,
loosely defined as a fortuitous intermeshing of events. Back in the sixties, we called it
serendipity.
Whatever you choose to call it, once you begin your creative recovery you may be startled to find it cropping up everywhere.

Don't be surprised if you try to discount it. It can be a very threatening concept. Although Jung's paper on synchronicity
was a cornerstone of his thought, even many Jungians prefer  to believe it was a sort of side issue. They dismiss it, like his  interest in the I Ching, as an oddity, nothing to take too seri ously.

Jung might differ with them. Following his own inner leadings brought him to experience and describe a phenomenon that some of us prefer to ignore: the possibility of an intelligent and responsive universe, acting and reacting in our interests.

It is my experience that this
is
the case. I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.

“God is efficient,” the actress Julianna McCarthy always reminds me. I have many times marveled at the sleight of hand with which the universe delivers its treats.

About six years ago, a play of mine was chosen for a large staged reading at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. I had written the play with my friend Julianna in mind for the lead. She was my ideal casting, but when I arrived in Denver, casting was already set. As soon as I met my leading lady, I had a funny feeling there was a bomb ticking. I mentioned this to the director but was assured the actress was a consummate professional. Still, the funny feeling lingered in my stomach. Sure enough, a week before we were set to open, our leading lady abruptly resigned—from my play and from
Painting
Churches,
the play that was in mid-run.

The Denver Center was stunned and very apologetic. They felt terrible about the damage my play would sustain by the abrupt departure. “In a perfect world, who would you cast?” they asked me. I told them, “Julianna McCarthy.”

Julianna was hired and flown in from Los Angeles. No sooner did the center's directors lay eyes on her work than they asked her not only to do my play but also to take over the run of
Painting
Churches
—for which she was brilliantly cast.

“God is showing off,” I laughed to Julianna, very happy that she had the chance to do “her” play after all.

In my experience, the universe falls in with worthy plans and most especially with festive and expansive ones. I have
seldom conceived a delicious plan without being given the means to accomplish it. Understand that the
what
must come before the
how.
First choose
what
you would do. The
how
usually falls into place of itself.

All too often, when people talk about creative work, they emphasize strategy. Neophytes are advised of the Machiavellian devices they must employ to break into the field. I think this is a lot of rubbish. If you ask an artist how he got where he is, he will not describe breaking in but instead will talk of a series of lucky breaks. “A thousand unseen helping hands,” Joseph Campbell calls these breaks. I call them synchronicity. It is my contention that you can count on them.

Remember that creativity is a tribal experience and that tribal elders will initiate the gifted youngsters who cross their path. This may sound like wishful thinking, but it is not. Sometimes an older artist will be moved to help out even against his or her own wishes. “I don't know why I'm doing this for you, but …” Again, I would say that some of the helping hands may be something more than human.

We like to pretend it is hard to follow our heart's dreams. The truth is, it is difficult to avoid walking through the many doors that will open. Turn aside your dream and it will come back to you again. Get willing to follow it again and a second mysterious door will swing open.

The universe is prodigal in its support. We are miserly in what we accept. All gift horses are looked in the mouth and usually returned to sender. We say we are scared by failure, but what frightens us more is the possibility of success.

Take a small step in the direction of a dream and watch the synchronous doors flying open. Seeing, after all, is believing. And if you see the results of your experiments, you will not need to believe me. Remember the maxim “Leap, and the net will appear.” In his book,
The
Scottish
Himalayan
Expedition,
W. H. Murray tells us his explorer's experience: