How to forget your work.

I love this artwork of a snail festooned woman.

But what does it have to do with anything?

So, I’ll tell you. Words are like snails. Look at their shells. The snails shells. They keep going. The spiral goes on forever, you have to trust, even when you can’t see the whole thing.

The other day, a dear young woman fríend wrote to me about her work.

She was concerned about her nature and whether it was conducive to writing. she can write and write and write, but she is certain that her words suck and there is no sense to them, no meaning. no them. no her in them. But still they come. She can’t turn them off.

Based on my vast knowledge in this field (ha! how many hundreds of years have I been at it? are you smirking?) I said, to myself: focus. Let her see there’s hope. You are no longer a scatter-brained writer. And two more things immediately came to mind. And two more.

And then more thoughts lined up even as I said, no, two things only. Keep it plain and simple. 

1. it is impossible to see everything in your own work.

2. others will decide what it means. your job is to keep writing and let things cool off sufficiently so you actually forget them. as you get older this gets easier, because you forget little things like why am i going into this room? why am I? why I am asking why?

But this is good, this forgetting. And also all the words. If you didn’t write them all down. There would be nothing to forget. This many words struggling to emerge can only mean your life is filled, bombarded and ever constantly in motion deep inside a rich and imaginative world.

A world that smells as if a two thousand and ten croissants are baking in the huge multi-shelved wood fired ovens.

A world where snails are being plucked from the tarragon bushes in the working garden.

Where two steadfast paisley-garden-gloved farmer ladies make fingered furrows in the ground for Roman carrotte seeds.

And a world where roman roots such as these grow two legs and are imperative, imperative I say, to take baskets of back to the kitchen and hand them to another, who chops them and steps up on the ladder to add into the huge pot of roasted veal bones simmering with roof-dried San Marzano tomatoes and Ukrainian leeks.

At the corner baking table, in this world, the crew who actually hand rolled all these many thousand croissants are taking a break, and twirling forks of anchovy and garlic laden pasta con sarde out of the kitchen’s signature mustard glazed pottery bowls.

Now these bowls are so deep and so wide, that you can jump in and swim to the other side, arriving to Croatia. Where another story begins.

Ao I added another thing, a third thing. Go live your life. Run that run. Bike that hill.

Live in the world where snails are being plucked from the tarragon bushes in the working garden.

Write another story with all the words. All the snails. Write. Write them all down and step back to forget them all for a time.