MYTH #6: ARTISTS ARE MUCH MORE TALENTED THAN ME: WHERE WE FURTHER DEMYSTIFY THE ARTIST
“I was just a pawn with a pen, taking it all down.”
—SUSAN G. WOOLDRIDGE, POET
Natalie Goldberg, poet, painter, Zen Buddhist, and author of Writing Down the Bones, one of my favorite books on writing, was once asked about talent. She said, “I guess I don’t believe in talent. I know talent exists. Like maybe you’re born pretty—but so what? What does that get you?”
Talent is like an underwater stream—equally available to everyone. You tap into it with your effort, and it flows through you.
When someone decides to dig for oil, nobody questions whether or not they have the “proper talent.” The oil is there. It isn’t thinking, Well, I like those Koch brothers more than Pam Grout. It’s there for anybody who has the desire to keep digging. Nobody needs to see your degree, nobody cares if you have formal training.
Granted, some of us live in Russia or Texas or Saudi Arabia, where every other acre has a potential oil well, but what’s to stop any one of us from moving there and buying a shovel?
So the good news is anybody who wants to be an artist can be. All it takes is (a) the desire and (b) the willingness to keep digging.
The important point is you are tapping into something else. You are being a channel.
Henry Miller, the famous writer and painter, tells us that any artist who really understands himself would be very humble.
“He would recognize himself as a man who has a certain faculty which he was destined to use for the service of others. He has nothing to be proud of, his name means nothing, he’s only an instrument in a long procession.”
Ideas and inventions and messages are floating around in the universe, seeking life, needing places to land. Our job is to be the air traffic controllers who steer them in.
Faulkner once said that if he hadn’t written The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Requiem for a Nun, and other books we now regard as classics, someone else would have written them.
The reason we idolize and canonize our artists is because they’re transcribing important stuff. But they, the artist, are not the geniuses. The genius is the incredible stuff floating in the ether.
“The idea that I created this piece of music is kind of pompous,” says Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. “Music is everywhere: all you’ve got to do is pick it up. It’s like being a receiver.”
We’re channels, people. Nothing more.
Remember Ouija boards we played with as kids? Back when we wanted to know who we were going to marry or whether or not Billy McDaniels even knew we were alive?
Put your fingertips gently on the plastic divining rod. Say a prayer. And begin.
