Intuition/Intellegence

Is writing the same act as painting? Both inspire intense concentration. Do I apply instinct to the page rather than intelligence ? I’ve always referred to myself as a “by the seat of my pants” kind of writer. I am primarily a poet. I mostly never know where the images I ink come from. People bring to my poems an understanding that I may not have. I get asked sometimes why this and I don’t know the answer. Just because doesn’t really cut it. The question of why this and my not knowing sometimes causes me to feel inadequate, like I’m not a real poet because I don’t know where the poem comes from. It just comes. I simply trust my intuition.

What Beatrice Hastings says about diaries is “keep a diary, and one day it will keep you.” That’s how I feel about writing—it keeps me. But not in a bad way. I’m not chained to it. I will say, though, I can be consumed by it for hours at a time. I’m obsessed with words like banana. Peel the banana and its meat is exposed. Can I use the word meat to signal its fruit? And should I write refer rather than signal? What fun it is to exercise my mind! Heavy lifting, though hard, helps to establish language. And what a pleasure it is when the strain bares sugar!

Philip Hook writes in Modern, “you could lose control—of yourself, of your fate, of your instincts—and the consequences were often dire.” I looked up the word dire in my Webster’s (I know, the old fashioned way rather than googled). “A warning of disaster. Exciting horror.” For me, not to be able to write because I lost control of myself would be horrifying. I dropped exciting because not writing would leave me forlorn rather than brimming with happiness.

Back to the word intelligence. I think revising requires a mix of intuition and intelligence. Do painters revise? I think not. The paint dries. The painting is finished. The painter could cover something up but the painter the can’t delete what’s there. And if they swipe the finished canvas with paint, I would bet that the change would require a great amount of brush strokes. Delete a word in an essay and it’s gone to be replaced by another that’s more exciting. Yes, whole paragraphs can be deleted but there remains something magical in exchanging a single word for another.

Love your intuition. Some would call it divine. I certainly do.