don’t panic

Hier ist das Lied von Gestern auch:

You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything.

– from Letters to a Young Poet By Rainer Maria Rilke

The beginning of An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?, by Immanuel Kant:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” — that is the motto of enlightenment.

Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.

Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.

From this interview.

GJ I’m really interested in what artists consider failure to be. Is failure a book that doesn’t sell? Is it a book that doesn’t work, that doesn’t touch on and then push through certain issues (formal, political)? Earlier Daniel quoted Beckett, who mused, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” And I quoted Gertrude Stein, who stated, “Failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” I wonder if failure is the writer’s success? Can writers fail successfully? How can writers fail better?

AE Failure to me isn’t a book that doesn’t sell. Though it might be to my publisher, and certainly to some writers who are writing for a commercial audience. If I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail on my own terms. Others may have definitions of what failure for me is: not selling X number of books, or receiving bad reviews from certain journals or papers. Part of my job as an artist, as a writer, is to disregard that. I write without a net. If I fall, I hit the ground. I’m more Icarus than Daedalus, and believe me, I’ve taken my share of falls. I like to stretch and challenge myself, always. If I stop doing that—that’s failure to me.

A book that has at its basis an agenda that overshadows character and plot and art—that’s a failure to me. I’ve encountered books and writers who are determined to write fiction about this or that issue or subject. It gets too wrapped up in preaching, it closes itself off to the rest of the world, doesn’t allow the world to actively participate in the global conversation that Daniel touched on earlier. But that’s not to say a book can’t be political. Absolutely not!

As for failing better, I think we can fail better by failing bigger.

DA Borges has that great line that I’ll paraphrase: like all writers, he judged his peers on what they had written, while he expected to be judged on what he might one day write. It’s all possibility. Every text, every idea, once transcribed—once the words exist on the page—is a failure, whereas the unwritten books are beautiful opportunities we haven’t yet squandered. The conventional, simple definitions of failure—bad reviews, poor sales, et cetera—thinking about this stuff is a good way to go crazy. Since no one really knows what sells, or why—since every great novel we could think of has been poorly reviewed somewhere—why would we waste time thinking about these things?

The only way to inoculate yourself against failure is to embrace it as an essential part of being an artist, and use it as motivation. If every book will only be an approximation of that idea that first inspired you to write, then why not chase the big ideas?

Interesting comments in this interview with Hemingway. I especially like those on leaving things unsaid when writing, and how your knowledge or ignorance about the things that you leave out still permeates the text.
There is also some stuff about how he writes, like where he says that he tries to stop only when he knows what comes next, so that he can easily start when he comes back to it.

“My books give the reader an impression of solidity, of a real structure. But
this is not the result of pulling out a rotten passage, calling it weak, and
strengthening it. It’s because the book began as itself and I guided it to grow
solidly. As the author, I retain control, of course. Sometimes I say that
writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to
sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even
better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet. A chair
with three feet promises a fatal fall. No three-footed chair will last. Writing
is my job. It’s the work I do, what I build. I don’t believe in inspiration. I
don’t even know what that is. What I know is that I have to decide to sit down
at my desk, and inspiration isn’t going to push me there. The first condition
for writing is sitting–then writing.”
– José Saramago
http://www.bombsite.com/saramago/saramago4.html

XXXVII
¿Dices que nada se crea?
No te importe, con el barro
de la tierra, haz una copa
para que beba tu hermano.

XXXVIII
¿Dices que nada se crea?
Alfarero, a tus cacharros.
Haz tu copa y no te importe
si no puedes hacer barro.

– Antonio Machado

“Lose this day loitering, ‘Twill be the same story Tomorrow — and the next more dilatory. Then indecision brings its own delays, and days are lost lamenting overdays! Are you ernest? Seize this very minute! What you can do, or dream you can – begin it! Courage has genius, power and magic in it. Only engage, and the mind grows heated. Begin it, and the work will be completed.” – Goethe

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Work