it.” We don't truly know ourselves until we put our experiences into words or images with love and abandon.
EXERCISE 2. Six Ways to Dream with Your Eyes Open
Write down a morning dream. Keep it alive all day. Think about it at breakfast, in the car, at the café, until it inspires a response. Now make something out of it, a song, a poem, a story, a weaving, a mosaic.
Go to an art museum. Pick one painting. Look at it until you see it. Walk around inside it. Lose yourself in it. Imagine you're the artist. Re-create it in your mind so you can always conjure it when in need of inspiration.
Spring open a long-locked trunk. Strong smells and old possessions transport us; they catalyze memory and summon the muses. Let them trigger a story.
Focus and relax. William Wordsworth's secret trick for inspiring himself was concentrating on one thing, then turning away with what he called “soft eyes,” relaxing, until whatever he saw became beautiful.
Spend a day blindfolded. Martial arts legend Bruce Lee practiced his hardest moves with a bandana over his eyes until he could see, he said, with his inner eyes.
Read to children. It sets their hearts on fire and rekindles your own. Remember that The Hobbit sprang out of a single line from J.R.R. Tolkien's “Winter Reads,” his improvised stories to his own kids. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit . . .”
WHAT THEN SHALL WE DO?
For R. B. Morris, a prolific singer, songwriter, and playwright from Knoxville, Tennessee, reverie is a subtle but powerful trigger. Recently he explained why:
It's the starting point for me, the threshold of creativity. It's the moment where all your other mental and physical functions fold into “dreamy thinking or imagining,” as Webster's says, “fanciful musing, a visionary notion.” If we really want to cultivate our creativity, we simply need to schedule our lives around the production of reverie. Frankly, I have to declare myself severely undisciplined in matters of creativity, but I do try to move toward those times of day when reverie comes easiest, such as the hours of waking or before sleep. The mind seems more willing then to throw off the harness of the world and allow the otherworldly to emerge. Of course, then one has to cultivate one's own process of observing and taking notes. Still, for all one's cultivation, the muse has a tendency to come and go as she pleases. So it's best to keep pen and paper at hand, even if I'm driving my pickup up on the mountain, and be ready to roll with the reverie whenever it occurs.
You know that a deep chord has been struck in you when a story, an image, a color, a drawn line, a melody taunts you until you figure out why you've been so deeply shaken. Australian director Peter Weir's film, The Year of Living Dangerously, did just that to me when it was released over twenty years ago. Rarely a day goes by that I don't hear the voice of actress Linda Hunt, playing a male stringer for a Malaysian newspaper at the time of Sukarno's overthrow, asking plaintively: “What then must we do?” She asks this at the crisis point when she takes a stand for all she believes in, even at the risk of her life. She asks it again and again in a fierce voiceover as her fingers fly across her typewriter keys. The challenging question is taken from Tolstoy's Confession, a searing account of his mid-life spiritual crisis when he saw “nothing ahead except ruin.” The answer came to him in a voice: “See that you remember.” Then he woke up.
With the whole world coming at us like a great thrashing wave, how do we recognize and remember reverie, especially when technology is now doing so much of the recall for us? There's only one trick I know of and it's not really a ruse. Write it down. Beat poet Gary Snyder once told me: “The only difference between writers and everybody else is that we always keep a thirty-nine cent notebook in our pockets. You never know when the inspiration might hit.” Many years later, I was startled to hear, in a radio interview with author Anne Rice, that she relied so heavily on daydreams that, for her, writing is daydreaming, which sometimes provides coded messages, including entire characters, like the twins in The Queen of the Damned. Jorge Borges ardently claimed in his Harvard lecture on craft that all writing is guided dream. Shadowbox artist Joseph Cornell said his work happened in a half-sleep. “Our dreams are a second life,” he said, “the overflowing of the dream into real life.” Photographer-artist Joanne Warfield tells me that reverie comes to her “in the form of enchantment or trance. I watch thoughts, ideas, and images floating by like leaves on a stream of consciousness. Sometimes when I'm in the midst of creating, reverie appears as inspiration for me to try something innovative—but I have to be alert, which can be hard when you're enchanted.”
THREE WAYS TO RECOGNIZE REVERIE:
The shudder: “First a shudder runs through, and then the old awe steals over you,” says Plato. Don't be afraid of it. The muse is near.
The shiver: Vladimir Nabokov, in his studies on American Literature, describes the moment of truth as the one that sends a frisson, a shiver, up your spine. Trust it.
The amazement: Be amazed by it. Amazement is second cousin to awe, a friend of astonishment. Be wary of the snarky people who mock your love of life, your desire to make art.
HONORING THE FIRE
To take the first step on the path of the creative journey, you must honor any moment that sets your heart on fire, because it's a sign that you've fallen in love with the work. Your creative life depends on it. The life of your imagination swings on the rusty hinge of your commitment to your inward life. The wellspring of your creativity depends on the presence of Eros, the god of love, the archetypal force that brings forth meaning, wisdom, and beauty.
If you're looking for clues to a robust creative life, you can find them in the courage to create out of a sense of unabashed joy. This is Rumi's “secret turning,” the slow revolutions in the soul of the dervish, the poet, and the lover that, in turn, turn the universe. It's the “creative breakthrough” that scientist Alan Lightman describes as the moment you finally flash on the answer to a crippling conundrum. And it's the “zest and gusto” that Ray Bradbury says is the prerequisite for honest and impassioned work.
I've had to make these tough turns throughout my career if I wanted to create honest work. When I was stuck on the forty-ninth draft of a story from The Book of Roads, set in the Philippines, I had to plunge back into that sultry world by cutting open a mango. The explosion of smell immediately vaulted me back to the rice terraces in Northern Luzon, where I heard the fruit seller singing, “Mango, mango, manggggooooo!” That sensory surge helped me finish the story. To write “Pitch Dark,” a baseball poem, I opened my dad's old army trunk and retrieved a box of baseball cards I'd put there many years before. I selected a few cards and was transported back to Tiger Stadium where the poem unfolds. To write about the myth of Sisyphus in Once and Future Myths
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