A Beautiful Anarchy. David DuChemin

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СКАЧАТЬ but we’ve allowed the arts to co-opt that word while making every other area of human creativity feel a little too self-conscious about using it. And I think we’ve misunderstood the creative process, which if it’s anything at all is messy, each successful endeavour hardwon, each masterpiece the result of a hundred failed sketches and many tears.

      It’s the fundamental creative urge within us that makes otherwise rational people take complete leave of our senses and have children. It’s that same urge that compels people to build houses, find cures for diseases, build companies and products, solve complicated mathematical problems, or write music. The same creative urge that compelled the first cave man to draw animals on cave walls is the same urge that compelled him to carve obsidian into arrowheads and hunt those same animals for food and clothing. It is that impulse within us to follow the whispers of our curiosity, or the urgency of our needs, around dark corners and into the unknown, that is responsible for every astonishing advancement in our history—the discovery of fire, the law of gravity, the revolution of the earth around the sun, the evolution of the species, and the creation of Michelangelo’s David, Picasso’s Guernica, and Handel’s Messiah.

      For every advancement that has taken place, every creation of some new beauty in some new field, that advancement has taken place as a movement from the known and accepted into the unknown and, at times, unaccepted—to the point of outright rejection. Galileo was declared a heretic for his idea that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. Darwin’s never been popular with the same crowd, either. Picasso’s cubism was revolutionary and took several years to overcome initial negative reception, even from fellow artists, people who should know better than to hang on so tightly to convention.

      Of course, public reaction, either negative or positive, is not the point. The point is that the long history of creativity—in every imaginable field—takes us inevitably into places where we have to pour new wine into old wineskins, and that invites criticism, which in turn invites fear, and soon we’re back to hiding in the shadows, letting others take the risk while we abdicate the responsibility to do the one great thing we can do with our lives—be fully ourselves and make art of our lives.

      This book is an invitation to celebrate the life creative, and in so doing to embrace its essential and beautiful anarchy. I use the word “anarchy” metaphorically rather than politically, as a call to live our lives on our own terms, which is the only way we can fully be ourselves. It’s a call to live our lives free from the bondage of should and ought to: the only way to be truly alive. We need more of these kinds of anarchists, more people who understand the extraordinary beauty and brevity of life, and who daily find the courage to follow that voice that calls them to something more, even when they don’t know what that something more is. Even when that voice calls them to places beyond the points that other voices say they should turn back.

      What we do not need is anarchy for anarchy’s sake. I value this thin metaphor of anarchy because I think, as a metaphor, it represents a beautiful way of life, and of thinking about the creative process and our lives-as-art. When I chose to use this metaphor I did so because it works for me. This beautiful anarchy is not about freedom from law, nor my own desire to live with, or without, certain rules. But where I do embrace rules, they are rules I have myself signed off on because they resonate with me, they make the world a better place and are, I hope, descriptive of my life, not prescriptive. I’ve chosen to live by the rule of love, kindness, and respect—toward others and myself. I believe in forgiveness and grace and, so far as it aligns with my conscience, the law of the land. I pay my taxes. I believe in being a responsible citizen. In fact, I believe the life this metaphor describes makes me a better global citizen, and a better human being. If the metaphor fails for you, then find one that works, so long as it leads you to the freedom and joy of creation, and of doing so in the most authentic way possible.

      Whatever metaphor you choose, I hope this book gives you the courage to begin filling your canvas again, and if you reach down for the brush only to find it hardened from lack of use, then throw it away and plunge your hands into the paint. However you have to do it, don’t leave your canvas blank. Don’t deprive your soul, and the people around you, of the chance to see you fill every inch of that canvas—messy and wildly human as it might be—with every flaming colour.

      LIFE IS SHORT

      That life is short is so blindingly obvious to most of us that it’s become a cliché. I’m not sure where the line between truth and cliché is, but it’s thin. And I’m not sure that we can be free of the truth of things, or free from the chance to act on them, merely by calling them cliché. Sometimes I wonder if we call things cliché in order to excuse ourselves from thinking about them.

      Our days are numbered, folks. Not only are they limited, we have no idea exactly how many days remain in the storehouse. Our time here is not merely a resource to be managed. It is all we have, and it’s insanely beautiful at times, but it’s short.

      One of the gifts of photography is the way it makes us conscious of time. Time is one of our raw materials. Our exposures are measured, in part, in fractions of a second. Sometimes so fast the shutter is closed before you know it’s open. The best photographs also rely on the strength, beauty, and universality of a particular moment. Blink and it’s gone, but when photographed it remains, frozen in space and time, to consider for as long as the print remains. Photography helps those who are willing to see the moments we’d otherwise miss. And moments are important because the way we live our moments is the way we live our days, our lives. Photographs—the best of them, at any rate—honour the moments, and they speak to us because we know how limited these moments are. Time is limited and we’ve no idea how much of it we have, so the sooner we cherish and redeem it, the better.

      Time is not money. If time were money we could borrow it. We could steal it. We could bank it and see our days compounded. We can’t. We can live it. We can use it to do the thing we are here for, or we can waste it. But we can do little else with it because it’s not ours to control. It’s given to us in unspecified measure to wring from it what we can.

      I am strongly motivated by the brevity of life, not because I fear its end (though like Woody Allen, I’d rather achieve immortality by not dying than through my work), but because, simply, it will end. What I control is how deeply I live my days, not how long. But I think somewhere along the way the urge to live deeply gets subverted.

      We settle. We find a path of lesser resistance and we take the deal, because it’s easier to be safe. It’s easier to fit in. We’d rather tiptoe through life and make it safely through, because we seem to have willingly forgotten that there’s no reward in making it unscathed to our funeral.

      Why we take the deal in the first place is another discussion to be had later, because it’s got a lot to do with fear and the voices we listen to, but it’s important to realize we’ve settled. There’s not a week goes by that someone doesn’t tell me they envy my life (and by that they usually mean the good bits, the public bits of my story; few have told me they desperately want to take the path I’ve taken to get here) and that they wish they could do what I do. And I get it. I really do. But what they seem to mean is that they want what I have without paying the price I’ve paid to get here. I know people want to change the world and create great art and live the dream and so on. So do I. But some want to do so without giving up what is demanded, by life, in exchange. Were life longer I might have time to do it all, but I don’t, and so I make choices: do I do this, or do I do that? Seldom am I given a choice to do both. I don’t own a home. My freedom from mortgage payments and maintenance issues frees me to travel. Some can do both. I can’t. I’ve made a choice. I’d rather have a plane ticket to Bali than a big screen television. But to the one who sees no choice but to keep up with their neighbors, the television comes first and the plane ticket remains a dream. For me, if owning the latest car or appliance means I СКАЧАТЬ