This is a talk given at the commencement of the photography and film programs at Rockport College in Rockport, Maine. Why would you, a working professional, need such idealism? Well, in fact it is entirely practical. Read it and you'll see.

And while it was addressed to photographers and filmmakers, the questions it raises arise constantly in our work in communications.

When I was asked to talk to you today my first thought was that I was supposed to give you a dose of wisdom before you wander off into the Fog of Life. You can save it for when your ideals and your reality diverge…which they soon will, I promise. Listen carefully and you'll learn where a certain sphinx awaits with a serious question. It will insist on an answer, and I am going to tell you what the question is so you'll have time to think about it. (Is this like cheating on a test? You decide.)

Up until today there have been any number of people who cared about your work— your teachers, your fellow students, some friends. But by Monday it will be down to that one person who got you into all this in the first place—your inspiration, your truest critic, your most faithful supporter, your lover and sometime-enemy…yourself.

Yes, this is the person who steered you away from a practical course, say, pre-med or business, or perhaps prompted you to quit a perfectly good job to pursue photography.

What could you have been thinking?

Well, you weren't. At least not in the sense of considering the angles and calculating a choice. Art, which is so powerful and compelling, is a path that makes no sense at all when you think about it this way.

But there are kinds of thinking other than thoughtful analysis. They are invisible, like the wind, seen only by what they stir up.

Here's an example that most teachers wouldn't take as an instance of thinking: Michael Jordan can run down a court, stop, turn and take three steps one way, fake, take three steps the other way, turn again, jump and send a ball through hoop that he hasn't looked at since mid court.

Most people wouldn't call this thinking at all. But some thinkers do call it intelligence. Educator Howard Gardner in his book Multiple Intelligences, calls it kinetic intelligence. Dancers use it. So do neurosurgeons. Surprise!

And he cites other intelligences—musical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence—and adds them to the verbal and mathematical intelligences, which were, for years, the only ones educators acknowledged. For the most part you can't measure these intelligences, but you can see what they do. And here's the thing: they all come into play in the work of the artist. That's you! You integrate them in ways beyond understanding. And you don't need to understand them, any more than you had to understand grammar to begin speaking.

So, through some kind of invisible extra-conscious thought process…something happens, and you can't say what it is. You just see the results. For us it might be a photograph, but it could be a painting or a performance, or some poetry, or a sequence of film. And when you experience what making it does in you, that can change everything.

It certainly changed me.

I was working in theater right after college. It was a new theater, so it ran on pure intensity, and I threw myself into it day and night for 2 years. It was great, but after 24 months of this, I was completely burned out. On my few days off, I wandered away from the theater looking for a place to lose myself. Instead, on one of those days, I found myself. What a surprise!

It was in a room of an old abandoned house. There was a window with ripped, white curtain luffing into the dark. I took a picture.

When I printed it, I saw something that stunned me. The photo itself wasn't that great, but it had an effect and a meaning that the room itself had not. It was lonelier and spookier than the room. It was not just what was in the room that made it happen, it was what was in me. And I only saw this when I saw my picture.

How did I do this? I thought about it then and, ever since, tried to understand it. And I've managed to understand some things about it, but these slivers of understanding have never helped me to do it better. And I still get my first inkling that a picture might be good when it surprises me. It looks rather as though someone else borrowed my camera for a moment, someone who's a much better photographer than I am.

I venture to say you've all had this experience. Something you have no recollection of doing turns up in your work. You know just how exciting it is. Get a few of these and you can be forgiven for thinking, "I could do this. I could be a photographer." This is the way these things begin. You make something that says you are better than you thought, larger, wider, deeper, fuller. And once it happens you want it again…and again. Who wouldn't?

So we ask ourselves, "How did I do that? Let's see, I had my camera, of course. And it was 5 in the evening—that nice light—and I was in a part of town I'd never been in before. And, uh, I was wearing my green sweater."

But it wasn't the sweater, and it wasn't the light, and it was never the camera. It was something else, and here's what I think it was:

To tell you, I have to introduce the idea of something called the heuristic process. The word heuristic derives from the Greek work eureka, which means ‘I have found it.' And it describes a process in which we give ourselves so deeply to the act of perception that we take what we see right into ourselves and then give forth a version of it from inside, tinted by all of the possibilities within us, transforming the way an oyster takes grit and makes a pearl. Understand that this is a lot more than catching something we see on film. It is making a new thing. And it is this mysterious event that lifts one photo out of the piles and piles that we make, up into the realm of art. And that photo we've made, charged with our resonances and possibilities, is what others get to see. But the biggest result is not the picture, it is that after making it, the patterning inside us is different than it was before: we are expanded by the event.

I'm not speaking figuratively. Thanks to brain imaging, we have started to see something of how we're changed. When the brain encounters something new, something it has never seen before, its neural pathways shift, and some synapses become more active while others become less so. If someone sticks wires on your head and knows what they're doing they can see the image of your brain on a monitor. It lights up like a pinball machine.

Then after the stimulus is removed the brain reverts toward its prior state. But it doesn't go all the way back. It retains some of the new patterning. You create neurons every time you learn something new as a record of how to do the thing. You do this only when you learn something new. The first few years of your life were completely taken up with this patterning and stretching as you encountered the bright light of birth, then 'Mama', then 'doggy', and on and on. This is exhilarating, but after 40 or 50 years of it, it can become a bit too intense. I guess that's the reason that people tend to get conservative when they grow older: They want things to stop and stay where they are.

But not artists. They go looking for the change. It feels great to them—a snap of fear of the unknown and a triumph over that fear, something new, then a rush of dopamine to the brain. How many times have you done some kind of new work and felt moved by something odd and unfamiliar about it, knowing that this is it, the new thing?

If you feel this happening, the trick is not to try to name it. Just keep it going as long as you can. Surf it if you can. Name it later.

So this is the real and secret reason for wandering around with a camera and an open mind. Making art changes us. So does looking at it. Richard Serra, the sculptor, said (vehemently, as he says everything) "Art has no function!" He meant that you can't sit on real art or cook on real art or live in it (he was talking about architecture). But I think it does have one function, which is to change those who make it and those who see it. Of course, it is not the only thing that does that. New arguments change us, new concepts, new people, new places…even propaganda. But artists make the change from inside. They use it to grow themselves. It is exalting — and exaltation is pretty hard to find in the everyday.

So there's a succinct definition of a good day of art for you: the person who comes home from making it is not the same person who left that morning. It may not always be a huge change, but its there and it adds up.

And if you do it enough, you start to trust the process without understanding it. You start to count on it, to invoke it, to work with it, and as you experience it you are less and less willing to accept from yourself work that looks like something you've seen else where .

Of course, imitation of other's work can be a productive way to investigate form. I spent years driving around looking to see if Walker Evans had missed anything. Then I was Irving Penn. And, of course, Robert Frank. (Who wasn't?)

But while doing this, you keep an eye open for your own work to start to emerge. The clue is that it looks like nothing else you've ever done and it seems unusually alive. Remember, you don't want to make something that looks for all the world like a photograph, you want to make something that doesn't.

And, when you do have an experience of change, and start to follow that experience looking for more, you're done for. You're like a mouse that has been caught by a huge invisible cat. That cat is going to bat you around at will for as long as it wants to. Sometimes you just want to be quiet and you pray for it to stop. But if the cat ever does stop and leave you, I swear, you'll go looking for it.

And the cat does leave.

After a while, artists begin to want a few basics in their lives. They want a car that reliably starts. They want to live free of roommates. They want a house, health insurance, a spouse, children.

So those of us who have been infected by art eventually begin to think about how one might go about getting some of these things.

And we become aware that there are jobs that are called 'creative.' A would-be novelist might get a job with a trade publication. A painter might start designing or become an art director. A photographer interested in art might, as I did, fall easily into advertising.

And, lo, the bills are paid and our financial worries are over, or in some cases escalated to larger ones…a boat, a summer place, orthodontics.

But here's the thing: this kind of creative work isn't really artistic. It can seem artistic because it uses some of the same skills. But think about it. When you do art work you leave on your journey without knowing the destination. If you have goals for your concepts, they are there to be exceeded.

But in 'commercial creative' work you are told where to go at the very beginning. You are directed by whole communities of people, most of whom are not artistic in the way that you are. They are not looking for you to change your mind or theirs. Specifically, they don't want that. They want you to affirm what they think.

Think about that change of mind, the thing that is the real reason you do what you do, the thing that nourished you before you came here to study and nourished you through the program. It has been a kind of food for your life till now. So what happens if you stop eating?

Nothing much at first. Besides, you will be busy enjoying the fruits of your career. It secures your place in the world, and you do need that.

Still, in time you may notice things. Maybe you are at a movie and there is some image you didn't expect that just alarms you by the force of its truth. Maybe some music just takes you inside it. Maybe you come across some piece of work that once transported you. Maybe that work is your own, and it dawns on you that you haven't done anything like it in years.

Doing the work of change is the taproot – a crucial part of your life, a reason you are who you are, and if you cut it off, that part of you will wither.

And that's when the Sphinx—remember her?—shows up. You tend to encounter her in the middle of some struggle or upheaval. And she puts her terrifying question in a slightly exasperated voice. She asks, "What are you doing?"

If you look at the question honestly, it will send your thoughts back to what you started out to do. It wasn't to get a job, it was to find things out.

Well, that's not what you were expecting to hear about at your graduation, was it? Your creative death?

But bear with me here, I'm trying to jump you over this whole thing. I'm trying to get you familiar with what might happen so when you encounter it in your own lives maybe you'll think back. ("What did that guy say at graduation?")

So I'll tell you about all this now. And by the end of dinner tonight you will have forgotten it entirely. And I hope you may never need it at all. If, for example your ensuing work is such that the Guggenheim turns its entire property over to you for a show at age 35, as it has currently to Matthew Barney, if you're that focused and motivated you won't need this.

But I did need it, and lots of people I know did, and do.

I got lost. I became so involved in my work, in being a good commercial photographer, that something just…left. I never even noticed.

To be sure, working at a job, being good at it, is not wrong. Absolutely everyone has to figure out how to live. And as often as I fantasize about being somehow supported so that I can do what is important to me, the fact is that being an artist is not God's Holy Work.

But, even if you pursue the ‘job' of a gallery artist, you gravitate toward making work that dealers like, that sells, that gets you recognition: you may start turning your back on impulses that don't accord with this. It is hard to set aside something that in one way is working quite well for you. I remember a photographer telling me that the great teacher ,Lisette Model, looked at her work and said, "Go take pictures of things that are ugly."

So graduation day is a good time to decide that, no matter what else you do, you will keep doing whatever you need to do to make work that moves and changes you. And, if you wake up someday some years hence and find that you haven't had that shiver that your pictures used to give you, as I did—well, its not the end of the world. And there is something you can do on that very day.

I picture creativity as a large room with many doors into it—music, writing, film, painting. You've been used to going in through the photography door, but say it has become so clogged with abandoned projects, unexamined ideas, ego, and other trash, that you can't push it open, can't even get near it.

What do you do? Forget photography. Set it aside. Go over to another door and push on it, and you'll find it swings right open. Make some music, try out for a play, take a poetry class. Not because you want a career in theater or to become a poet. Do it to change your mind again. Do it seriously, give it your time. Don't worry about doing it well, just do it. Let it happen in you. I tell you that something will come alive in you again.

Does this work? For years I've conducted a sometime workshop that is often filled with fried photographers. We do exactly what I described here and you can see the ice in their minds breaking up.

Would it work for writers? Naturally. They would just go take pictures.

Doing this new thing may or may not invigorate your career. But don't insist that it has to. Just wake up. Have that experience, seek it out, and see what comes of that. Then go where it sends you. Do what the big kitty says. After all, this is what got you this far, and it can take you much farther..

And, with luck, you'll have that wonderful experience that mixes epiphany with the moment in a roadrunner cartoon when the coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and out across the air and doesn't fall. The trick, if you're a coyote, is to deliberately not take it in that you're running on air. The trick if you're an artist is to take that startled energy, that awareness of awakeness, and somehow keep it going without stopping to think, How am I doing this?

When things really begin to happen, it can feel just like something is going badly wrong. And that is just the time to really persist. I had a Tai Chi teacher who called this "investing in loss." He was telling me to balance on one leg, sink lower and lower, and relax my muscles completely while doing it. Obviously impossible, and I just on kept falling over, so I complained that his teaching wasn't working. But he pointed out that while I had stopped relying on muscular effort, I had yet to put my trust in chi. I would have to let go even more, keep falling over, if need be, to get to the point of giving up what I knew to reach what I didn't know. I would have to invest in loss, and if I did, chi would support me. Now, I didn't even particularly believe in chi, but I persisted, and it worked. I was stable and strong. (And I'm still not sure about chi.)

But here's a warning: a return to making our art is not a return to fun and ease. I don't know where this idea got started that creative work for the accomplished artist is a serene progression, but it's not. It can be transformative and exhilarating and all that, but I've never found it to be easy.

I have just finished several years of work on a book about trees, photographed in beautiful forests all over the world. Because the forests are bucolic, people assume doing the work was serene stroll in the woods. It never was, not once. It was fraught, very often frantic and anxious, sometimes exhilarating, but never calm. The reason is that I wasn't looking for trees or serenity. I was looking for that controlled explosion of art. I never really trusted that it was all around me, even though it had revealed itself hundreds and hundreds of times before.

People assume that because they take most of their pictures on vacation, being a photographer is like a perpetual vacation. That would be like seeing an entertaining movie and assuming that making it was entertaining. People who make them know better.

Of course, we still seek to be secure in what we are doing, and we start trying to find some certainty. But I heard Serra speak recently, and some one asked him about gaining enough understanding of one's idea so one could start working on it. He said, "The place where you are dumbfounded by your own lack of understanding is the place to start working. Once you stop doubting you might as well stop working."

This is where your real work begins, every time you begin it. And the end is not to make pictures but to change your mind. If pictures come of it, or songs or paintings, think of them as by-product.

So that's your piece of Graduation Wisdom.

But since you are image-makers, I want to leave you with a more direct experience that may make it clearer. So close your eyes and listen.The way the word sinks into the deep snow of the page.

The deer lying dead in the clearing,
Its head and antlers transparent.
The black seed in its brain
Parachuting toward earth.

The poem is Silence, by Gregory Orr. When I first read it I just felt thoughts drop away as I was taken into the presence of that poem. It changed me to read it. And then I thought, what makes this poem work so deeply? It is this mystery that keeps me coming back, keeps me trying.

That's the work, then, to make these things in ourselves, to bring them out into the world.

I honor the works you have made here at school, but much more I honor your working. Those who can recognize it, always will.

Stay awake.