People who know my work well have said that my process, when it's functioning as it should, is intuitive. They caution me not to think too much. But I am a conditioned worrier and thought is the kingdom unto which the worrier lives and toils.
Intuition. Don't you love that word? Just saying it makes me feel as if my arms are being thrust open wide, as if I'm about to embrace someone. Or some thing.
Thought. Can you feel yourself drawing in, tightening?
When I'm not worrying, I'm galloping wildly, jumping fences, feeling the blood course through even the hairs on my body. I'm muscle and nerve conducting electricity. I'm free.
I don't think about the million physiological or neurological events/stages/steps that must be taken to achieve this.
I simply run.
Trusting that my heart will pump the blood that will profuse the muscles that will innervate the lungs that will supply oxygen to the brain that will release the endorfins that will signal a response ...
Imagine if we had to do this, be in charge of our involuntary systems. Look at the chaos and destruction I would have just wrecked upon my own body. I don't know all the intricate nuances of how the heart works in conjuction with the brain and the lungs. I could study it, learn how it works. There are those who do know. But to pull those strings that make the whole marionette dance? Impossible.
And yet it happens all the time. It's happening right now in billions of bodies the world over. Except for the man laboring to breathe or the woman lying in a pool of her own blood under a car in a ditch, not one of them is willing their bodies to act. And even those who are willfully making demands -- for the lungs to fill with air, for the blood to clot -- they are helpless to the body's deep-seated intuition.
I don't know if a novel can be written automatically, wholly intuitively, though there have been writers who explored automatic writing. Painters as well have tried different methods for getting to the level of impulse. Throwing paint on the canvas. Working furiously, not minding the brush strokes. Robert Olen Butler addresses this in his book From Where You Dream, outlining methods whereby one brings about a kind of self-induced hypnosis that moves the writer deeper and farther back into the mind.
The writer's trance is akin to REM sleep. It's the deepest, innermost terrain of the creative innerworkings of the mind and yet it feels as if one is sitting right in front of the mind, like a driver peering through the large window of a bus. It's a doorway into which the writer passes and comes out the other side onto a new landscape.
When we "think" about any of this stuff, it closes. The door slams. The mind seals itself off from us.
Is it necessary to know how the sun rises and sets to reap its benefits? Perhaps. But there are mysteries that seem to work only by the exercising of one's faith. Who knows what fuel is produced by our deepest intuitions or how it fires the cylinders that turn the pistons in our minds.
Do not lean on your own understanding. Trust. And just run.
2 comments:
I love this post and you've reminded me of Robert Olen Butler's book, which I have, and which I found useful and inspiring.
Don't you LOVE that book? I go back to it again and again. It's just fabulous in the way it explains the creative process. Robert Olen Butler is just a genius any which way you slice him.
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