Working on the handpress is from another time. Another time in my life and another time in history, the eighteen hundreds, when everything was massive, industrialization was sweeping, civil war, manifest destiny, reconstruction, carpetbagging. Everyone was writing in those days, well, for those that could it was the way the word was spread, communication was by letter until the telegraph. I don't know if it means much, but people expressed themselves through writing in the everyday, and maybe it isn't so different now, imagination, but it seems like maybe it is. There is something about putting a pen in ink and then to paper, like typewriter's have a certain atmosphere, with the sound of the keys hitting paper, that means, somehow, the writer is speaking and someone is listening, a conscious effort is being made to put into words things of the imagination, hopes, feelings, dreams, and even if nobody reads them, there is energy that goes out and we are becoming.
Julia Cameron speaks of this in her book, "The Artist's Way," Tarcher / Putnam, 1992, when she talks about doing morning pages, a kind of meditation through writing, she also calls it "brain drain" as when you do morning pages you're not supposed to think about that you are writing a novel, but to put your stuff on paper, anger, feelings. Anyhow, she says that it's best to write with a pen on paper and at least three pages, just to make the movement real, to "unblock your creativity", as that is what it's all about, this book, finding and learning ways to be creative, finding your Muse.
'Nough said.
"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with peoples' dreams --their visions, really-- we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape."
--Julia Cameron
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