What do you do when you don’t know WHAT to do?  “Concentrate on one thing,” an adult student of mine said the other day.  “I’m trying to help get the public library system back on its feet,” she added.

We are, of course, still speaking of post-Katrina New Orleans, where the pace of recovery could aptly be called glacial despite the hot dry weather conditions here. There’s so much to be done and so few to do it that a kind of lethargy, intellectual and physical, can set in.  We work hard, but we can’t see the progress.

I had a chance meeting with a writer friend over coffee a few days ago, and what could have been a five-minute conversation expanded to three quarters of an hour.  I was deeply grateful for that time together; there was such positive energy in his words.  I explained that I could teach, practice and sing in public, but that my writing had stalled a bit since coming back to New Orleans.  “Everyone has lost something,” he said (he had among other things severe flood damage to his house).  He returned to New Orleans very soon after the storm and was asked to write a series of articles for the New York Times about conditions in the city.  It was like pulling teeth to get started, but he did it.  “I know how to write an article,” he thought, and proceeded to sit down and do it.

My friend is not lazy, nor am I, but sometimes we simply need to remind ourselves that we can trust that huge repository of ideas which we have stored within us.  We can depend on that reservoir because we have spent a lifetime of disciplined practice within our field of endeavor.  As a singer, I’m forever pursuing the perfect scale.  That would be the one where every note rings freely into the next one; where there are no abrupt shifts of physical feeling or resonance as I go from one note to the next; where I can start softly and crescendo to my biggest tone and come back again to a thread of voice on each note of the scale.  I can do all of this on any vowel I choose, and then introduce into the vowel a particular emotional color which my imagination offers me at that moment.  When did I last sing that scale?  I haven’t yet, actually, but I try most every day of my life.  

After I have pursued my (possibly) attainable perfect scale, I make friends yet again with a piece of music which I have practiced a great deal, and which I love.  Lately I have been singing Handel’s Dove sei, amato bene from Rodelinda.  Within it I know where all the bodies are buried, so to speak.  I remember phrases I sang with ease and those where I had to solve problems, and my body recalls the sensations produced by years of good choices.  Soon my practice becomes physically and emotionally pleasurable to me.  I am ready to attempt something more challenging, because I have become reacquainted with an old friend who will stand beside me as I confront new difficulties.  The entire time I haven’t had a thought about national, state or local politics or the myriad goings-on within the university.  My sense of possibility has been rekindled, and I can accomplish tasks which ten minutes earlier seemed impossible.

Burnout-- a sustained period of creative paralysis--scares anyone whose living depends on the ability to write, play, sing, paint, act.  History books are full of stories about a promising career begun and then stalled for years (the composer Jean Sibelius would be an example).  Who knows what causes these profound silences?  The circumstances of living can provide ample grounds for interruptions.  The death of a spouse, or close friend, the loss of affection from friends, the devastation of a hurricane—all these can make us want to go into hiding. All the more reason to practice regularly every chance we get.  On the stage, for instance, sometimes there is no time whatever to think.  We can only react when someone skips a beat, or when we forget a word, or someone’s cell phone rings during a quiet moment.  We must then rely on our hours of careful practice to guide what we do, so that the audience remains undisturbed by our momentary distress.  And such is the power of our reactions during a bad moment that our creativity may be reawakened.  It is, perhaps, our only hope.

Some years ago I had a brief conversation with the late composer Paul Cooper.  We had known each other over a period of years, and he had given me a manuscript copy of his song cycle, From the Sacred Harp. I performed those songs many times with great joy.  “How have you been,” I said.  “Oh, you know my wife, Christa, died a few years ago.  We were such soul mates; I just couldn’t compose a thing.  But now I’m working again, and it’s good!”  “What allowed you to resume writing,” I asked.

He explained that he gone to see his primary teacher, the American composer Ross Lee Finney, who was quite elderly at the time.  “In that afternoon, he unlocked my creativity,” Paul said.  I wasn’t able to continue the conversation beyond that moment, and not too long after that Paul passed away.  I’d love to have been in the room, watching and listening during that mentor-student interchange.  Was it the profound knowledge and love that the old teacher had for his student which provided the safety for Paul to resume his mind’s playful activity through music?  Was there one particular thing his teacher said?

I’ve written a fictional account of what happened that day, in my head, many times. “Remember that lovely short piece for flute, ‘cello and harp you wrote when we first started working together?” Mr. Finney might have said.  “I ran across a copy of it the other day.  It’s as fresh as the day you wrote it.”

“Yes,” Paul could have said.  “It’s funny, though, how that little transition from the first theme to the second theme gave me trouble.  I’d probably solve it quite differently now.” 

“Let’s have a look at it.  I’ve got it right here,”  the teacher said.  And then, in this meeting I am trying to imagine, the teacher improvised a very different version, which made Paul laugh, something he hadn’t done much since his wife’s death.  When he heard the version, a key turned in the lock.

“Oh, I could think of a hundred things to do there,” he said, sitting down at the second piano. About three hours later, the old teacher and his student had traversed miles of musical territory, without a hint of the desert which had loomed behind and ahead of Paul an hour before they’d met, ostensibly just for tea.

Life in New Orleans post-Katrina is no picnic.  One of the nearby streets has a deep enough pothole that some solid citizen discarded a washing machine in it.  Sometimes there isn’t enough water pressure to shower in the morning.  Mail service is still iffy.  Insurance money hasn’t been paid to many policyholders.  People come from afar to open health clinics, and the city can’t hand them a valid permit for their building.  These are the daily woes of New Orleans residents.  There are much deeper causes for sadness, of course.

I think about this next one a lot because it held my creativity hostage for a good long time.  Inclement weather and bad engineering have combined to rob an entire population of the illusion that we can, with any certainty, plan for the future.  People who have experienced catastrophic events in their personal lives—a deep betrayal, death of their children—have always known this.  But imagine a place where everyone has experienced deep bereavement, and you’ve got New Orleans, and the entire Gulf South for that matter.

It is hard to start again, to move forward, to be creatively and artistically involved.  Yet, like my friend, the writer with the New York Times assignment, like my friend, the composer, I must and I will.  I go back to basics.  I trust myself.  I depend on well-established routines to break through this dry spell.  Maybe, if I pay close attention as I go through my usual repertoire, my imagination will fire as I take each breath and start each phrase.