"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art." - Charlie Parker
A Casi Cielo Salon member asked for suggested writing resources, and I thought I could offer a quick-&-dirty savvy list. The truth is I'm stumped. (I'm sure something will arise--if you have suggestions, please comment below).
So much writing advice applies to memory--whether it's memoir (memory) or fiction (imagination). Yep, imagination, as fun as it is, stems from memory, too--I'll cite more of this research in future [1]).
This Salon is about the dynamic unfolding unfurling flux of inspiration.
I like Natalie Goldberg's books (although many exercises and prompts are focused on memory, too). I'm recently reading and enjoying, Walking on Water: Reading, Writing and Revolution by Derrick Jensen.
The question I'd pose now is a what if... What if you do have access to the entire font of resources and sources in all the cosmos within you?
I heard my spiritual teacher respond last night to the question, "What does it mean to 'look within'?"
He replies, "Imagine this: Don't look outside." Pause. Long pause. The gap in the song widens.
"Don't look inside."
That's unexpected. The choir is silent. The song is still a song.
"Stop."
This is point, if you want to give it any sense of measurement, is the present. Nothing to be learned, nothing to be sought yet all available.
"It's almost at the threshold at what your mind considers inside and outside."
If you practice this 'stopping', then you'll just write what comes. Okay, not prescriptive enough?
Try this. Carry a little bitty notebook or at least some slips of paper around with you. At times you feel you are seeing clearly without evaluating or weighing it too much (and if you are evaluating, observe and jot down your evaluating as if you were the first or third person narrator).
Jot down what you see just like a visual artist might take out a pencil and sketch the plein air scene in front of her.
Sketch in words (or song or by pencil). Describe the object of your attention. However whatever you describe it is perfect.
"What's a perfect pine tree? What's a perfect rose?"
Jack Kerouac carried a small notebook for impromtu 'sketching' for two years. As he says himself about the ensuing book of pocket sketches:
(Proving that sketches aint Verse But Only What Is)
(…Written On the Little Pages in the Notebooks I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952 Summer to 1954 December…..)
....But only what is. What is. Reality. Right before you. Sketch-write that.
Here are three snippets from those sketches:
"...a pink-tinged pastel,
the No Carolina afternoon
aureates through the
white Venetian blinds
& through the red-pink
plastic curtains & falls
upon the plaster, with
soft delicate shades - here,..."
"-The
gray sky above has
a hurting luminosity to the
eye & also rains with
tiny nameless annoying
flips & orgones -
life dusts of Time -
beyond is the vast
aecidium green Erie
pier, a piece of it,
with you sense the
scummy river beyond-"
"She prepares the aluminum
Silex for coffee – never
Puts an extra scoop for
The pot – makes weak
American housewife coffee
--but who’s to
Notice, the Pres. Of the
Waldorf Astoria? – She
Slams a frying pan on a
Burner – singing “I hadn’t
Anyone till you….”
[1] Eleanor Maguire and Demis Hassabis have done research on the neurological connection of imagination to memory. First instance I saw of this research is in the book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, by Frank Rose.
ART CREDITS: Charlie Parker by Tomas Marceiras Prego
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