making a fool out of fearlessness

The terrible thing about blogging, I've found, is the loss of revision. I seldom spit out something I can proudly give my real name to without lots of corrections and stewing and crossed out lines and tiny illegible scratches in the margins and wonderfully satisfying crumples of paper or data bases growing around me.

This place is a mess of false steps, and so awful to me, is the fact that once I've posted I cannot erase or go back and change because somebody has already read it and it's time to move on to the next post.

The immediacy of blogging fills me with apprehensive stuttering almost as badly as the act of speaking. "No, that's not what I meant, and that's not what I meant either. What I meant was this...fuck, no, that's not right either." When I can't think of the right word, I stop mid-sentence and clam shut. Or I get defensive and angry. The blanks where subject and verbs should be, where meaning should be, are more numerous than the articles and prepositions surrounding them, a mad, mad lib.

I wonder if at some level, learning has hampered my wit. When I have the luxury of time, being given a limited series of notes from the past few days, I've already carefully chosen and put together ingenius. Put on the spot, instead of hovering, I can proceed with confidence because the next measures in time are predetermined. I have practised for hours and months my plan of attack, and even my emotion and mood are pre-selected and manipulated to serve a performance. I have this trick into sounding improvised and natural, but it is anything but.
During the period of practice I find a solution or interpretation through experimentation, which means that I go through many pieces the wrong way before I find what I like. I don't think that I am creative in the same way that I've seen other people be creative--I've never been able to come up with something entirely new, only work with what is already in front of me. The way I produce and find myself is through making lots of mistakes and tripping over my feet. The only thing that makes me creative is my fearlessness of making a fool out of myself.

In private, with no one watching.

But the stimulus for keeping this up, here, (the only place I can improvise and still have some leeway with the amount of time between words before there is a noticeable stammer), is my effort to redeem myself of the foolishness of the other day's post. Sometimes I dread it, I think, "Oh god, do I have to try and look stupid again?" More often I think, "I know I can do better, because that sucked, and if it sucked, that means I know how to be better." After all, it's really not a huge sacrifice. Though it should be. To be good. And also, when you don't have time to think about it, it's more like life than art, which is the point, but it's an often ugly one. I can't revise events, not even in my mind if I write them down accurately which ends up serving memory too correctly for the soft filter.

Writing is revising.

So what is this, exactly?