The Nearly Morning Pages Every So Often

I'm afraid of committing words to paper. There, I've admitted it. Paper scares me. The computer screen is OK but the paper page is like a blank canvas - once you have violated that purity and positioned yourself on the sublime infininate white space that is it, no going back, no erasing. On a computer, its very very different. You can delete and amend to your heart's content. Re-write, re-frame, save, edit, draft, edit again, read it, swap it around, destroy everything if you like, write it all again, then finally publish. It's a cowards way of writing, really, but its better than nothing!
The computer allows you time, but can remove sponteniety. It does however encourage parallel thinking. Halfway through you can wander off and research a subject or find a replacement word or even world, and get lost in the internet - but the danger to cut and paste other people's ideas is then very present. You may lose yourself along the way.
In "The Artists Way" the emphasis is on the writer/creators own authentic and unedited ideas, and thus writing on paper is crucial. There really is no substitute to unfettered free-association and scribbling. You can write in the lines, in the margins, create your own concrete poetry and have no lines at all. You are not limited to the serial process in this repect, as one line does not necesarrily follow another as in the process of typing. You are present and in the moment but also leave a legacy. It will probably only be a private legacy but it belongs to you. So why should it be any more scary than writing a blog that any Tom Dick or Harriet can see? Its a barmy paradox, is what it is!
And if you dont like what you've written, there's always the shredder or the fireplace, if you really really want to "delete without recovery". But maybe mental recovery depends on the ability to recover lost documents of your existence. Hence writing. It doesn't really matter if its on paper, on screen, as long as its written down - in your own langauge be that alphbetical, musical or visual - that's all that matters. In a world where we are subdued by other people's texts and contexts, where we are assaulted by information and the simulcra (images plastered over images plastered over reality), where we cannot pick the threads out of the ropes around our necks, its even more important to reinforce our own identities with our own texts.

(By the way you might have noticed I haven't used any spellchecking here. Make of that what you will!)

                                          (ceramic scribbles)