January 24, 1994
Keep The Pages Flowing!
Keep the pages flowing!
Do not stop!
One hour of writing a day.
In the process, I hope to come up with something of value. I want to win people’s love and admiration. A little worship from animals wouldn’t hurt either. After all, they have souls, and, even though they can’t pay mortgages, a little worshipful energy from them wouldn’t hurt.
I feel vulnerable this morning. I feel vulnerable whenever I write. I walk on the edge. I have no idea where my words come from. They seem magical, a gift from above. When I write I seem to disappear; my hands become instruments.
Creation can cease or overwhelm me at any moment. Will the word gifts keep arriving? Must I pray, beg, fall down on my knees? Is sitting at the computer enough?
No one knows how a word is created, much less a sentence, poem, or novel. Yes, I wrote them yesterday, but will I write them again today? Every morning I stand at the edge of a cliff, peering into a new abyss.
I jump. . .and hope I can fly.
Creativity combines creation and destruction. The old must be destroyed before the new can be created. Creativity and security are opposites.
When I write, dancing in the frightening limbo of the ever-hanging present, I destroy my yesterday before I create my tomorrow.
Security is an illusion. There is only the hope for security, the hope that somewhere in a future paradise it will exist for you. Hope for that drives you on, fuels your daily fare.
What a shock to realize that, for the creative individual, security does not exist–and all human beings are creative, though much of their daily creation consists in denying their creativity by searching for security.
Are the dead creative, too? Perhaps, but quietly so.