On Writing and the Artistic Process.

On Writing and the Artistic Process.

Usually, from what I have heard most recently, it would appear that what follows is the conventional method of the Writer:

 

1.       Write regularly.

2.       Select from what has been written what is best.

3.       Eliminate the rest.

I might have once believed this. In Middle School, my seventh-grade teacher criticized me for my tendency to submit papers that were about half-occupied with thick black blotches from my having attempted to vanquish my mistakes. I was a pathological perfectionist for a long time, refusing to write about anything that I did not feel was the Absolute Truth, or at least my most sincere, heart-torn guess. The temptation towards the comfort of revision – the privilege of regarding my work as though it were my creation – was a double-edged sword and a curse as well as a blessing; I became mired in my own confusion to the point of what some would have called a clinical anxiety.

At one point, my friend and fellow writer must have asked me if one ought to write regularly or not to if one wished to be a writer. A student at Berkeley, he might have in fact been merely parroting an orthodoxy which I misheard as a question. At any rate, I had to ask him for clarification as to his conviction. In hindsight, it seems to have been the aforementioned attitude: Write daily. Edit. Purge. Repeat.

I no longer feel that way. Perhaps it is a testament to my success in the Art of Living. I rarely if ever edit. I have made it a point to only write great work, even if it takes me several months to see its greatness for myself. This is because, as Heidegger had pointed out, I have realized that Art is something independent of me. Like a child, I have no right to judge it.

Art is a tree from which I pluck fruit. I have become skilled in plucking it only when it is ripe. I never prune it. Like a parent, I have freed my life to be ready to answer its cries at any moment. Yet when the tree does not yield fruit I go to another tree. I have planted many trees. Writing has become to me what painting must be to the visual artist or performance to the musician. Only the most neurotic or unsatisfied of painters litters the dumpster with completed but rejected paintings. As with one’s decisions and nature, one must live with them. One cannot undo a performance, and rather than insisting that all bootlegged records be destroyed I am in rapture at my own imperfection.

I am not the trumpet but the mouthpiece, and just as poetry flows through me so does prose. The feed-back of the Crowd does not dissuade me, for I find the ultimate spiritual attainment in the marriage of a deeply personal ambition with the tolerance to take proper note of its eventual attainment.

Yet this destination has not been attained without a long and arduous road that nonetheless sheds light on every step in the journey as beautiful not only as a step but as a destination.

 

Dm.A.A.