#15
After the End

... comes the rewrite.

The yinsanity of creative writing is reckless and free - rewriting, premeditated. Writing is frenzied shamanic dancing - rewriting, black magic.

The source of composition is you and the blank page, one/zero, a bi-unity that transcends words - until words molest the blank page.

Vision of this class, where abstraction and language conjoin, is indeed a de/construction of identity.

"For whom is the stone Buddha waiting?" Kobayashi Issa wonders.

Yinsanity is the creative response to the blank page, to emptiness, which is the ultimate Other. Sessions with this Other cure us of language, resulting in a condition often misconstrued as a malady (variously known as writer’s block, cat-got-the-tongue, drawing-a-blank, mind cramp). In fact, silence - as any Zen adherent will tell you - is the hallmark of mental health.

But silence for most of us, especially writers, will not do. Death makes us possessive. When angels couple what's it to us? The seraphic serenity and formless beauty of the blank page, so divine, mean precisely nothing. Our expressiveness depends on imperfection.

And so, we get yinsane and write. And so...

... we come to the rewrite. Molesting the silence, the blank page, the Other is never sufficient. We want that sensation of "fine excess" that Keats yearned for. We are mortal. We cannot wait with the stone Buddha. We require the intoxication of the demonic, the infuriated and terrifying renunciation of the normative, the ordinary. We reject enlightenment, which insists that no effort is required. Everything, including all the phenomena that are you, is simply what it is. Cross the threshold from duality into the unity of all things. That "entrance" is everywhere, always just in front of you.

But not for the yinsane. Our disease reconnects us to the world. And that unease requires that writing is never enough. We must rewrite.

"There is no great writing, only great rewriting," says Justice Brandeis.

Hemingway glares over his apero of kir royale in the Café Deux Magots and growls, "The first draft of anything is shit."

Rewriting concentrates emphatic being and indifferent destruction. This is the love one has for zero.