It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in creating a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I am a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don't enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.
The book
And where the fuck am I with it? Trying to get a grip on this, to find a way in. I know of no way!! I could smash my way in, I suppose. Tap a hole in a window and reach in and turn the knob. What would that look like in real time? Find a gap in Chapter 3 where I left off? Am I still really beating my head over Chapter 3? Isn’t it time to move on? The rest of it though I am equally unsure about, so there is that. Chapter 3 has always been a…
Wrote my words
I feel virtuous and clean. I don’t know if the words are any good, they might not be! No matter. They accumulate. They give me raw material to work with. I feel content and like I belong in my world. 30 minutes @ 500 words. All it takes for that.
The thing with the book
is that there is still a disconnect for me about how it actually helps. I think it’s because I need to not look for ways for it to help that are linear. Like, it’s not that people will read it and then it will completely change their lives and everyone will become better people. I think it’s like: it is an inherent thing that helps if it is a thing that is completely itself. And that’s what art is. You make something that people can love, and that is how you help.
1+1=3 ... The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it's hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don't come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It's the essential equation of love, art, rock'n'roll and rock'n'roll bands. It's the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock'n'roll will never die.
Current daily word count is 300.
It’s a modest number, but do-able. Better than 100. Better than nothing. Not as daunting as 1000. Gives me time to sit and stare and meditate on the words, but still holds me to account for actually getting something down. Current tactic is navigating by feel. No forced marches. There is a lot of scaffolding, some of it permanent, some semi-permanent. I can orient myself with the permanent markers and within that write what I feel like writing. So far, so good.
Coming here with the radical idea to write FIRST
before I do anything else, because the minute I start making a daily list, the rest of it seems more compelling than writing, every last mundane item, feels more urgent than sitting here contemplating what I’m working on. So let’s contemplate writing. What the hell am I working on, the Catbirds? Yes. It is a wide field of not knowing. Not knowing if I should give it up. Not knowing if I should write new material and if yes, what. Not knowing if I should just slap the new stuff I’ve written for it together, like glue it on there,…
And often we can’t feel the sense of the divine, because we don’t let ourselves alone. I believe in the spirituality of radical non-self interference. And if we can just let ourselves be, then we will find that in that act of acceptance that there is something really subversive. There is nothing as radical and as subversive as an act of acceptance.
Feel like writing a major Overview of My Efforts Thus Far.
Where am I? Writing has not been a thing really this month, neither with the Catbirds or DOAB. Why? Because of busy-ness, yes, but is that all? Well, yes. Maybe it just is. I haven’t been willing to struggle, and it is a struggle to work it in. I don’t know what it is. I have been reading more. Maybe it is just a necessary lying fallow-ness, and I am allowed to trust it. I know how to follow the thread of what I am supposed to be doing, and it is just not what I am supposed to be…
So, the Catbirds is a cauldron of unknowns.
It pays to visit them though, to hold their hands. Should I join a writer’s group? Should I take this one lady’s class? Should I change the name? What I am actually avoiding is actually writing, though there are a ton of other figure-it-out kinds of things that I am avoiding too. I would like to remember the feeling of flying to New York: the way in which it was terrifying made it also exhilarating, and I remember thinking: I need more of this feeling in my life. Things that make me feel that way: to go to the writer’s…