Stoking the Creative Fires. Phil Cousineau

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      Later that night, I found myself eyeing the strangely amusing photographs of Sandaldjian's creations on the gallery wall. The exhibition catalogue described the artist as a virtuoso viola player and an ergonomics expert who had learned his miniscule art from a fellow Slavic musician. When he came to America in the seventies, he settled in L.A., but had difficulty finding steady work. Eventually, he began to create what one critic described as his “unimaginably minute worlds within the eye of a needle.”

      When my turn came to lean over and peer into one of the microscopes, I felt myself falling, as if down a slippery slope of metal tubing. At first, I saw nothing but the gauzy reflection of the inside of my own eyelid. Then the gallery walls seemed to close in; my head felt like smoke and my hands like ashes. I groped for the focus knob and twisted it until the image of Napoleon standing on a pedestal appeared, his hand thrust inside his black overcoat. Dazzled, I moved on to the next microscope. This one revealed a grain of rice on which was spelled out in Arabic: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.” Next came rice grains featuring Mount Ararat, reputed home of Noah's Ark, and an image of Donald Duck made from the dust of crushed diamonds and rubies.

      The Lilliputian artwork took my breath away, which is no throwaway phrase. Japanese calligraphers are known to wait for the moment between heartbeats before putting brush to paper. Sandaldjian cultivated the same discipline, waiting for the nanosecond between his pulses before cutting into the delicate rice grains—a length of time that's been deftly named the “creative pause” by Magda Proskauer, a teacher of breathing techniques.

       Hagop Sandaldjian creating his micro-miniature sculptures. Museum of Jurassic Technology.

       Baseball! Sandaldjian's microballplayer installed on the edge of a needle, 1970s.

      While gazing in amused awe at Sandaldjian's creation of a miniscule left-handed baseball hitter with a red cap, I overheard a professorial man say that those who'd witnessed the artist at work claim they couldn't tell when his hands moved. He appeared to be in a reverie, lost in a wondrous world of his own making. Looking up from the microscope, I had the sense of swooping back into my body, a sense that I'd encountered the work of someone who'd reached into the holy fire of the creative spirit. As Bill Cosby says, “I only told you that story to tell you this one.”

      Driving back to my hotel in Westwood, I was overcome by the reeling sense that transportive art always provides me. I felt as if I'd been gone for a long time, in a strange land. No doubt about it, the planet is bulging with artwork. But numinous art is rare, like the long-lost bronze statue of a victorious charioteer hauled up from the bottom of the Mediterranean. When we encounter what's been conceived in fire, the flames spread and we're set ablaze by the revelation of another world. We're inspired, but not out of fawning admiration. We're moved by the enchantment, the effort that moves us to what St. Therese called “the tenderness that moves words to action,” and the emotion that brings us close to whatever is divine in life.

      The Armenian virtuoso's work was more than impressive. It was compelling. It goaded me into looking at the world in a new way, like the magic mirrors held up by human hands in Jean Renoir's masterpiece, Beauty and the Beast, that forced Beauty to look at herself as she floated down the hallway. All great works, those infused with the soul of the artist, feel haunting because they seem to look back at you. They provoke you into asking yourself questions you've been avoiding. In the strange alchemy of art, Sandaldjian's work sparked a desire in me to work, to make something of my own.

      Later that night, as a scepter moon hung over the towering palm trees in the hotel courtyard and oranges fell softly into the pool, I was alternately riddled with awe and addled with self-loathing. Disappointment stung like a paper cut. I couldn't sleep. I had to wonder if I'd ever done anything with the precision and patience revealed by the sculptor's preternaturally steady hands. I drifted in and out of reverie, writing spidery notes to myself in a big black journal—random thoughts about what I wanted to accomplish before I died, books I vowed to write, and distant lands I swore I'd visit.

      Waking up the next morning, I wondered who'd snuck into my room while I was sleeping and written in my journal—in my own handwriting! Rereading the entries, I realized it wasn't enough anymore to be working on other people's projects, no matter how hip or well paid. Co-writing, editing, researching the kaleidoscopic sixties were all fun, but they didn't reflect enough of my voice, my world. I needed to tell my stories, release the daemon—or demon—that was lurking in me and clawing to get out.

      That's the beauty of reverie. It allows your mind to meander until the truth outs. It emboldens you to do the work you didn't know you'd been dreaming about—or had been assiduously avoiding. Sometimes it just takes a little nudge to move you where you ought to be. Sometimes it requires a spark to set off an explosion that prevents the earthquake of frustration. It's the creative work that keeps you from going crazy. The first step on the creative journey must be to recognize when the peculiar mood of reverie is upon you—those strange conditions that enable the unfolding of the creative process. This is why reverie is the first fire that must be stoked.

       THE RIVER OF REVERIE

      The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is the poet laureate of reverie. To my lights, he is one of the most sublime writers of the 20th century. In Poetics of Reverie, he wrote that reverie holds the capacity to exalt life and helps us to “inhabit . . . the world of happiness.” Tantalizingly, he adds, “If the dreamer had ‘the gift,’ he would turn his reverie into a work.”

      That's the key, the trigger, the tipping or turning point. If you've ever been deeply moved by the feeling of a waking dream—perhaps at a great play or opera, on a canyon river, witnessing a child opening a birthday present, or as I was by Sandaldjian's oneiric creations—then you know what it means to fall down the sweet slope of reverie. With its roots in the soul of the dreamer, reverie is a gift from below, the opportunity to dream with your eyes open. As Bachelard writes, in some ineffable way, we actually seem to be defined by our reveries, even created by them.

      To describe the waking dream demands something more than everyday language; the effort calls for words that, as many of us have suspected, cast a spell—words like “trance,” “delirium,” or “levitate”—tumultuous words that help describe the indescribable when we feel as if we've fallen through a trapdoor into another mood, or been lifted into another world.

      “When in doubt, look it up,” my dad used to say. Though he's been gone for twenty years, the touch of his hand is still there on my shoulder, edging me toward my Oxford Unabridged Dictionary. Riffling through its pages, I discover that “reverie” is an early 17th-century French word for “rejoicing” and “revelry.” Later, I summoned Mr. Webster and found: “a daydream, a delirium, the condition of being lost in thought.” These worlds within words help me appreciate reverie even more.

      But for me, the million-dollar question is how to turn the waking dream into the working dream. I've spent half my life tantalized by the possibility of consciously stoking the fires of reverie. Over the years, I've searched for compelling stories about creative people who lived for reverie, such as the painter Jean Arp whose ideal was to paint so others СКАЧАТЬ