There is something to be said for spontaneous expression.

Something that needs to be said, that arises without forethought, as if channeled from a beyond. There is a freedom and a looseness, where expression is unshackled from rumination or doubt. Lest anyone take this for a screed against revision, it is not. But there is a freedom in saying a thing and letting it stand, as it came. In the practice of getting something out and having done with it. 

Revision can, sometimes, ruin a perfectly good piece of writing with too much thinking.

There is a legitimate stream of thought in art making that states that you can ruin something by going too far, doing too much, working out all of the lovely bits you put in before letting that pesky brain get in the way. You kill the joy that brought the thing to life.

Chopin called his version of them impromptus, the idea being to harness spontanaeity and produce a work of uncommon beauty, something that emerges with the fullest of life intact, not smothered, light and unencumbered. Like letting a butterfly land in your palm and watching it fly away, unmolested. 

It’s what might also be called stream of consciousness, where the overweaning brain isn’t allowed to get in the way of the flow of perfect expression, emerging from the depths of consciousness intact, in an unending flow, like a ribbon out of a magician’s hat. I think of this and of Kerouac madly bashing away at his magnum opus, letting it all come out, letting it hang from his lips and be spat out like be bop, like the very thing that makes jazz free form and urgent.

Kerouac leads to Dylan, of course; one counterculture bringing forth more countercultures, a fractal sort of evolution inspiring newer generations to do everything possible to piss off the squares, and shake off the shackles, to be free. Dylan may have had the most famous run of stream of consciousness genius of all, aided in no small part by dexys, perhaps to bypass the oppressive niceness of midwestern reserve: his most fertile ’65-’66 period where he released no fewer than two full length LPs and a double album in an 18-month stretch, toured Europe to relentless boos, and managed to piss off anyone who thought that picking up an electric guitar meant betrayal. Which is to say nearly everyone who was a square.

There is something relentlessly powerful about living so entirely in an urgent present that it feels as if you’ve grabbed the reins of a horse and are doing all you can to mount the thing in mid gallop, to stay with it.

Like something I experienced this week: standing on a patio absorbing the glory of a late summer sun in autumn, noshing quite contentedly on a crispy, spatchcocked turkey wing, gazing at a red and white dahlia. There was nothing but sensorial joy in the act of doing this, a moment fully embodied, nothing felt missing or absent from that moment. It was one of a handful of such moments I’ve had in the past year, with fingers to spare were I to count them. It was entirely unplanned, and it was perfect, I mean there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, it was entirely unto itself a whole moment, a capsule of joy, and it needed nothing or no one else.

This is the feeling to aim at: a verdant present, where there is ever more to be witnessed and bring forth. A feeling of intuitive knowing—an undeniable yes—where something feels right, and you cease to hear the cacophony of your history heckling you to go in multiple contradictory directions, and instead feel a calm confidence of having gotten to where you need to be.