Thursday, November 24, 2011

Feeding the Lake


Here's an excerpt I shared at the last Answering the Call writing retreat from Madeleine L'Engle's "Walking on Water:"

If the work comes to the Artist and says, "Here I am, serve me," then the job of the Artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist's talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, "Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake."

I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my little trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn't matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years, I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work...Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly, than he knew; Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend.  When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, the Artist listens.

BUT we MUST work every day, whether we feel like it or not; otherwise when it comes time to get out of the way and listen to the work, we will not heed it.