I’m not sleeping well these days, I wake up with some details of an upsetting, unresolved conflict with old friends going through my head.   Sometimes, like Monday, I wake up and am able to succinctly state the exact, specific issue to Sekhnet.   “You should tell them that!” she says, but since it is not always possible to convey things directly, or in a timely way, I go into the other room and write.

I can’t stress enough how important writing has always been for me.   You draw a picture and nobody really knows what to say about it.  “Why did you put a Chihuahua’s head on that buxom nude woman’s body?” a friend’s father once asked me, with genuine confusion and a bit of concern on his face, like he was too dense to get an obvious joke but at the same time wondering why anyone would think such a joke was funny.  I smiled, having no answer, nor any idea why I’d combined those two elements in a realistic pencil drawing I’d shaded as three dimensionally as possible  It is rare that I have any idea why I draw a particular thing on the page, I just follow my hand and we work quietly together and I don’t ask questions or have answers.  It is the same with music, if I come up with a musical idea, I generally don’t put lyrics to it and it can convey virtually anything to anyone.  If you like it you will find a groove there, otherwise, what can one really say about such things?

Writing is altogether different.   You sit down with a feeling and an idea and as you set it down you picture the reader taking it in. What is essential comes into focus.   As you read what you wrote you can see what you left out, what muddles what you’re trying to say, what you’ve phrased poorly, with insufficient background or in a way that obscures your intended meaning.

In the end you have, if you aim for it consistently, something coherent. A point of view another person can take in, understand, agree or disagree with, react to, discuss, dispute.   Now, all on the same page, a knowing dialogue, in light of the things you set out, things you weren’t able to shoo away from your consciousness as you tried, pointlessly, to get back to sleep after waking up thinking about them.