From Where You Dream Read Free Page A

Newman painting, and whatever may have been in his brain about artistic theory, what confronts you is a massive experience of color and a delicate experience of texture.
    But you folks have it really difficult. No one in my position in any of the other arts has to say the things I say. Why? Because your medium is language, and language is not innately sensual. Language, in fact, is much more often used in non-sensual ways. Look at the paradox of this evening. I am inveighing against abstraction, generalization, and summary and analysis and interpretation in what terms? Abstract, general, analytical, and interpretive. Am I not? Well, that's the nature of human beings. There are things we have to express in this way.
    Now, I've heard no gasps of recognition yet, but let me assume that some of you are thinking, Of course, this makes sense. Oh boy oh boy! If so, you and I are still going to have to be patient, because—you know what?—your understanding is still here in your head, and it's going to take a while to make all this part of your process.
    If I had me to talk to me back when, I might not have had to write a million dreadful words. If I'd caught me at the right moment—and in the right spirit—I might have had to write only a quarter of a million—maybe not so many as that if I'd really listened. You might ask, why did he write five terrible novels? How many terrible novels can you write? The answer is that I had no idea how badly I was writing. None. And my ability to continue working through a million words was so rooted in self-deception that I might not have been able to hear this message. So those are the things you may have to sort through, too.
    The special problem here is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won't let them think.
    Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it's going to show.
    Why is it so tough to get past that? Why does Kurosawa say that the essence of being an artist is that you can't avert your eyes? Why avert them? We still haven't quite made that connection. If the artist sees the chaos of experience and feels
    order behind it and creates objects to express that order, surely that is reassuring, right? Well, at some point maybe. But what do you have to do first? And why is it so hard? This is why— and this is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us.
    If I say art doesn't come from the mind, it comes from the place where you dream, you may say, "Well, I wake up screaming in the night. I don't want to go into my dreams, thank you very much. I don't want to go into that white-hot center; I've spent my life staying out of there. That's why I'm sitting in this classroom, why I was able to draw a comb through my hair this morning. Because I haven't gone there, I don't go there. I've got lots of ways of staying out of there." And you know what? You still need those ways twenty-one or twenty-two hours a day. But this is the tough part: for those two hours a day when you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place—it can't be white-hot and dark at the same time, but I don't care—that paradox, live with it—whatever scared the hell out of you down there— and there's plenty—you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can't flinch, can't walk away. That's the only way to create a work of art—even though