Knife of the Artist, by Sigurd Decroos of Belgium

Behind that is the fear of recrimination, retribution or remorse from the people in your life who will by necessity appear in your story. While the fear of causing certain people pain does occasionally prick at me like a hard needle to the ribs, I find it easier and easier to dismiss such considerations in the drive to tell the story that is demanding to be told. The story is so ripe that I find myself writing it out loud during the day, narrating it to my iPhone, and organizing it in the margins of notes I take during meetings. I remember that this sole consideration is what kept Anaïs Nin from publishing her unexpurgated diary during her lifetime, and that this fear made her almost a lesser artist.

You have to be fearless. You have to write as if with a razor; excising extraneous detail and what absolutely must be removed for legal considerations, but honing right to the edge of memory. Otherwise the story will not be true. Truth may be a relative concept in the larger world, but inside the story, true is what you know intuitively. And it will be the white lies used to cover up feelings that will cut the story to pieces until it cannot compel. What is the point of writing it at all, if it doesn’t make a dent in the world?

Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.–W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge, 1943

I know my story needs to be told so someone will choose life instead of death. So some people in my story will have to understand, or deny me. I can live with denial, but I cannot suppress this story anymore.

My mind is still ping-ponging, unable to concentrate on anything for long, so it’s definitely a sick day. My eyes feel burned, and I have that aftershock twitchy feeling in my legs that comes from adrenaline overdose. But I haven’t been running. I’ve just been tossing and turning in bed fighting with my mind.

I hear snatches of conversation in the background of my mind. It’s not like voices in my head–well, to be honest, I don’t know, but it’s not coherent, anyway. It’s like my mind is a vast landscape, and the background is filtered from my captured experience. Pieces of movies I’ve loved, and the voices of characters from books, and parts of posters, sculpture, landscapes, music, scenes from memory, drift by. As I try to grasp them they float away, although some of them keep coming back around, over and over, earworms or turns of phrases, tantalizing, as if they are messages.

The thing that kept me up many years, before I understood this phenomenon, was to try to make the pieces fit into some coherent pattern. I’d try to grasp a piece and hold it, and that piece would loop in my mind for days. That’s where depression, mania, etc., etc., must start. From following those loops down into spirals.

I think schizophrenia is the state of being controlled by that loop, and creativity is making new patterns from what you find there. It’s a fine, fine edge between inspiration and insanity. The landscape between them, where I am occasionally lost, is insomnia.

Time devours everything and everyone in the end. Saturnalia is a profound mythic meditation on death and rebirth, the refreshing cycles of natural time that make it seem obvious to celebrate life in the deadest season of the year, and to remember our losses at the high-point of the party.

via For Saturn’s Sake, Remember the Dead | Religion Dispatches.