ARTISTIC STABILITY

My upstairs neighbor said, "If you could write the junk you did then and write the stuff you do now, I realize I can do anything. There;'s so much power in the mid. I feel like who knows what I can do!" She said the main thing she in the notebooks----whole notebooks of complaints, boring description, and flagrant anger----was an absolute trust in the process. "I saw that you kept on writing even when you wrote, "I must be nuts to do this."

It is true that I believed in the process. I was living in the boredom of long dry days in the hills of New Mexico, where Jaws played for six consecutive months in the only movie theater in Taos. I had a belief in something real below the surface of life or right in the middle of life, but often my own mind kept me asleep or diverted; yet my own mind and life were also all I had. So I began writing out of them. "I see as I progress through the notebooks that this kind of writing gave you who you are. It's a verification of being human."

When you begin to write this way----right out of your own mind----you might have to be wiling to write junk for five years, because we have accumulated it over many more than that and have been gladly avoiding it ourselves. We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. It is true that when we begin anything new, resistances fly in our face. Now you the opportunity t not run or be tossed away, but to look at then black and white on paper and see what their silly voices say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage and compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you. Besides, those voices are merely guardians and demons protecting the real treasure, the first thoughts of the mind.

 
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