Your Loyal Servant

It's easy, for me at least, to become overly enamored with The Brain. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider mine particularly extraordinary, but the brain is such a slavish devotee of facts and evidence and proof, all of which are so attractive for their statuesque certainty. What if The Truth is an argument you could someday win if you just piled on enough facts and evidence? What if The Truth was a single destination to which meticulous research and dispassionate calculation would same day lead you? That's a siren song if ever there was one, though a most appealing one.

Of all the arts, writing would seem the most brain-driven. Your brain is filled with all these word. The bigger the brain, the more words, right? Perception itself would seem to be the brain diluting reality down to its clearest and most digestible parts. Oh, the poets have their soul, but in the end, the novelist's brain, where his research is housed, where his plots are built, where his words are ordered like soldiers to be brought forward and marched across the needed sentences - the brain it where the work happens.

And yet the writer - the poet, novelist, essayist, or blogger - is no different than the painter, the dancer, or composer. All art, all creation, is choice, which is preference. The brain is merely a tool, a loyal servant at the beck and call of the soul, which is the source of all choice and all creation. The soul feels a preference, a direction, which the brain then turns into some kind of mental picture, and then, finally, attaches words to the picture to make sentences and paragrpahs so other people might see and feel the same thing.

I always run into trouble when I try to work from the brain. If you're feeling nervous, the brain is a tempting place to start becuase the brain is all about results and measurements and proof. The soul's only proof is itself. It's always tenuous, in a way, turning to the soul first, because it merely is. It doesn't care what anyone else has written, or what's being bought. or what is clever. It just wants. And yet when you tap into it, when you write from it, when the work travels from the soul to the brain to the page, there is nothing more satisfying. No work can make you feel more alive.

When the work's not coming, it's because you're asking your servant what to say. The servant wants you tell him what to say. He is loyal, hard working, dependable, but utterly uncreative. The brain has never had an original thought in its life.