Deciding to Stop; Deciding to Start Again

From whiskey river:

I remember the word and forget the word
                   although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
                   uncomforting as Braille.

We are our final vocabulary,
                   and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There’s only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There’s only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
                   making it otherwise.

(Charles Wright, Negative Blue)

…and:

Those who would make art might well begin by reflecting on the fate of those who preceded them: most who began, quit. It’s a genuine tragedy. Worse yet, it’s an unnecessary tragedy. After all, artists who continue and artists who quit share an immense field of common emotional ground. (Viewed from the outside, in fact, they’re indistinguishable.) We’re all subject to a familiar and universal progression of human troubles — troubles we routinely survive, but which are (oddly enough) routinely fatal to the artmaking process. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make art are those who have learned how to continue – or more precisely, have learned how to not quit.

Artists quit when they convince themselves that their next effort is already doomed to fail.

Virtually all artists encounter such moments. Fear that your next work will fail is a normal, recurring and generally healthy part of the artmaking cycle. It happens all the time: you focus on some new idea in your work, you try it out, run with it for awhile, reach a point of diminishing returns, and eventually decide its not worth pursuing further.

In the normal artistic cycle this just tells you that you’ve come full circle, back to that point where you need to begin cultivating the next new idea. But in artistic death it marks the last thing that happens: you play out an idea, it stops working, you put the brush down… And thirty years later you confide to someone over coffee that, well, yes, you had wanted to paint when you were much younger. Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again — and art is all about starting again.

(David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear: An Artist’s Survival Guide)

Finally, Robert Cray speaks to the power of a simple decision in just getting things going (click Play button to start, volume control at left; lyrics below):

Lyrics :

Stay, Go
(words and music by Robert Cray)

You never stay
You’re on the go
Three times a day
Or maybe more

Where you run to
I just don’t know
I turn around
You’ve got the Ford

Didn’t put any gas in it
When you brought it back

You’re out last night
The night before
And the night before that

Oh, you’re starting to worry me
Can I have the car keys back?

In, out
In, out
In and out, just like a cat

Never, ever stay at home, babe
If you’re here it’s just to change clothes

This in and out is driving me crazy
Are you gonna stay or are you gonna go?

(Guitar solo)

I’d love to have a date with you
Being my wife and everything

Tomorrow morning
When you get home
You’re gonna find
There’s something wrong

I sold the car
And hid the phone
So you and I can be home alone

Now maybe we can take a walk together or something
That’d be real nice

Stay, go
Stay, go
Stay, go
Stay, go

Stay, go
Stay, go

In, out
Stay, go

(from A Shame and a Sin)