What have writers shared about unleashing one?s best and most insightful creative work?

G. Lynn Nelson, a professor of English at Arizona State University believes we must undo some of what we have been taught about language and use language in our journals as it was once used-to evoke mystery. In Writing and Being: Taking Back Our Lives Through the Power of Language, Nelson writes, “Too often in school, we study language and writing in isolation, apart from the people who speak and write and apart from what happens when people speak and write.” He says teachers “play sad little games with language-circling misspelled words and dangling participles, making students feel small and stupid, and turning them away from the power of their own words.”

Nelson, in his fervor to help people find their truths through writing, wants to grab all those who think language is only the study of adjectives and pronouns and grammatical constructions and say:

… no one knows why between the ages of one and four, language emerges from within each of us, why we become incredibly, amazingly proficient at language, without ever cracking a grammar book or taking a test or even meeting an English teacher. But it happens. The gift of language emerges within us and waits there for us to find its power.

Michael J. Gelb shares another requirement for finding our true selves: the importance of not knowing. In his book, How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, he suggests keeping a journal to record observations, ideas and questions as Leonardo did. He says not to focus on goals or results, but to let thoughts flow and see where they lead. The journal is the place not to have answers so much as to have the opportunity to explore. He suggests writing three of your beliefs in your journal, then making a case for the opposite belief to examine your views from multiple perspectives.

We get more instruction viewing the art of writing from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, famous in America for the letters he wrote to a young poet who had queried him about whether his poetry had merit in the eyes of the master:

… describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator, there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Describe, Rilke says, not judge, generalize or extrapolate. Describe even the places you think are bereft of images. This way of writing peels off the layers of learning that tell us we must know what we are writing about. This is a way to come to your writing in a state of not-knowing to find again and again the deep power language bestows.

In a culture that demands quick answers, it goes against the grain to foray into our own experience without presuming we know what we will find. So, as writers, we need acknowledgment that like ourselves, famous creative writers have begun work without knowing what they will be up to in their writing.

I had the privilege these last few weeks of teaching, writing and touring in Italy. In Venice, my husband and I enjoyed a day at part of the city?s, Biennale, a bi-annual exhibit of installations, this year focusing on art from nations worldwide.

The texts I saw that the visual artists, especially from Japan, supplied with their installations confirms that not-knowing is where art starts and from where insight and beauty arise. They also confirm the temporal nature of life and the way art seizes moments that otherwise move quickly on.

I took photos of the texts I found on the walls beside installations. These words alone confirm that artistic vision belongs to all of us and is inside us all as well if we listen to our questions about the world.

Here are words that I treasure from three of those texts along with a few photos. The first are from Japanese artist Shimabuku, who wondered about native snow monkeys transported to Texas:

The Snow Monkeys of Texas: Do snow monkeys remember snow mountains?

When I visited the monkey mountain in Kyoto in 1992 I heard an interesting story.

In 1972 a group of Japanese snow monkeys was brought from the mountains of Kyoto to a Texas desert. The first year, their numbers reduced dramatically. They didn?t know how to live in the desert with cactus, cougars or rattlesnakes. But in the second year, their population grew. Do monkeys adapt to new environments faster than people do? I wanted to go and meet them someday.

In 2016 I finally visited them in Texas. I saw that they looked a bit Americanized somehow. They are a bit bigger and started to eat cactus. Now they know how to deal with the cougars and rattlesnakes. They have a new language to alert each other.

When I spent a few days with them under the Texan sun, I decided to make a mountain with ice for them. I filled a car with bags of ice. And I wondered, do they remember snow mountains?

The second writing is from a Japanese arts group called The Play:

The Play, is a group formed in 1967 in the Kansai region of Japan, that has ?never ceased to invent its own methods of collective action by creating the possibility that an event takes place without worrying about its outcome, … rejecting the notion of artwork as object and purpose…?

This year the group wrote this about their installation:

…We made a house (?ie? in Japanese) and lived in it for six days while floating down the Kizu and Yodo Rivers towards Osaka Bay. On the sixth day, due to a typhoon approaching, we could travel no further than the area near Toyosato Bridge, Osaka, so we dismantled and burned the house.

Another artist, Koki Tanaka, photographed himself on a four-day walk from his Japanese hometown to the nearest nuclear power plant there motivated by this idea:

Our lives are uncertain, but we simply ignore the reality of that uncertainty as long as nothing happens.? Is there a way to comprehend the realities we overlook? … I had to experience the distance to the nearest nuclear power plant through the ordinary act of walking?no in ?Fukushima,? but in the place where I love.

ArtMag by Deutsche Bank made this statement about the artist?s embedded video documentation?Of Walking in Unknown?(2017):

In front of a photo wallpaper of a tunnel, visitors can finally sit down, on rudimentary wooden chairs, and accompany Tanaka on his four-day march from his home city Kyoto to the closest nuclear power plant. Following the?Fukushima?disaster, Tanaka clearly suggests, the path leads to uncertainty. And for a moment it dawns on one that, just as all the knitted, tatted, and woven works here at the Biennale are human-made, so are the catastrophes of the world.

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Like all discoverers, writers and artists are always pushing boundaries. Travelling to Italy, I learned once again about the energy it takes to overcome unease and be okay without being certain. ?I learned again the exhilaration of finding one?s way.

Writing is a journey like visiting Texas from Japan, or floating down a river or walking miles and miles from one?s home or negotiating the narrow cobblestoned ways and canals of Venice. Writing, like all journeys, keeps us wondering, which is necessary for feeling alive. It helps us find an understanding of our world, whether that be affirming or disconcerting, that lies beyond what anyone else has taught us.