From my upcoming book for artists:

“Teaching without teaching …” said the young Zen disciple. “Is that truly possible?”

“Yes,” replied the master. “When the student learns without learning.”

There is more than one way to gain knowledge, and that insight alone is enough to get things going.

I sat in the class with what seemed an acute case of acid reflux. This was English 101, and I was a college freshman. The bushy bearded Professor Fulton had a reputation for being aloof and tough, which spelled a major problem for me.

The words we use in both conversation and writing not only reflect our state of awareness, they define our expressed consciousness, and by direct implication our quality of art and life.

Language can either liberate or imprison the user.

When was the last time you did some lexicon housekeeping?

Words can heal or spread like a virus, infecting both the unsuspecting user and receiver.

I have seen the phrase “flawed masterpiece” used by critics to describe various artworks, especially films. Either it’s a masterpiece or not.

There is no such thing as a flawed masterpiece—which is a contradiction in terms.

If a critic means to say that a film had its moments, but was unsatisfying as a whole, then let him say that instead of flawed masterpiece, which admittedly has a catchy ring to it—unfortunately, the phrase is empty and no one is home.

The following account is about writing; the point is vividly relevant for all artists.

“In 1969 Steps, a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, won the National Book Award. Six years later a freelance writer named Chuck Ross, to test the old theory that a novel by an unknown writer doesn’t have a chance, typed the first twenty-one pages of Steps and sent them out to four publishers as the work of ‘Erik Demos.’ All four rejected the manuscript. Two years after that he typed out the whole book and sent it, again credited to Erik Demos, to more publishers, including the original publisher of the Kosinski book, Random House. Again, all rejected it with unhelpful comments—Random House used a form letter. Altogether, fourteen publishers (and thirteen literary agents) failed to recognize a book that had already been published and had won an important prize.”

—Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections

Although Bowles, composer, author, and inveterate traveler, is writing about the Sahara and going native to some degree in the excerpt below, his descriptive imagery applies equally to one discovering art for himself.

From Baptism of Solitude:

“You leave the gate of the fort or the town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out into the hard, stony plain and stand awhile, alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call ‘le bapteme de la solitude.’ It is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory.

“Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaing the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for awhile is quite the same as when he came.”

—Paul Bowles