“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.  That, indeed, is nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.  Millet had done a hundred sketches of peasants sewing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable.  All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying and sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves, for one that was better and more universal.”

Willa Cather
 

Pretty Cool! -- MV

Once upon a time Noah asked God to create a website and facebook page in order to market GOD. And God was like, “Market myself?  Forget it, man.  I AM.” 

Here I am, human, infinitely more limited than an omnipotent being, and still paralyzed by the thought of trying to define myself for an on-line audience.  Instead of getting to work, I do what I always do when faced with tasks that are foreign or mildly distasteful to me: I begin over-thinking. (Can you hear the existential crisis speeding round the corner?)

But who am I?  Am I just one me?  And if I am, as I have always suspected, a crazy collection of manifestations, no one of which fits comfortablyfor more than an hour at time, then which “I” do I put forth as the definitive edition?   Which I do I want the world to think I am?  And am I then stuck with the I that I create?  Is the I that I create, and the I that I am, really the same person after all?  And who is that?

But then I think to myself, hold on, self!  Wait just a minute!  Who I am isn’t really the question, is it?  The real question is, am I cool, smart, attractive, experienced, witty enough to represent the book I’ve written.  I’d buy and read my book.  But would I buy my book from me?   Or not from me, me, but from the me I find on my blog, twitter account, facebook page, website?  Because let me tell you that that confident, mildly attractive, carefully benign individual is not me.  No really.

Yes, I know.  Just write.  Of course I know because that’s what I tell my students to do.  Don’t worry about it!  Just write and rewrite and the universe will unfold as it should.  Hypocrite!  I know.  But that too is a part of who I am.