Writing helps me think.

"To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself." - Anne Rice (via Enbrethiliel)

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I know Pope Benedict XVI said something like "writing helps me to think" but I can't find the quote.  (Ms. Rice's quote does not refer to the Pope of course.)  I liked the Holy Father's quote so much because here is a brilliant mind expressing one aspect of what it means to write - for the academic as well as for the simpleton.  For me, painting functions much in the same way - it is a way for me to document 'things' - thoughts, events, and so on.  In many cases, I think blogging and and other social network systems work this way as well - at least that is the only real sense I can make of it for myself.
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My friend Enbrethiliel has a wonderful post on the subject, expressing this idea much better than I could - because she is a better writer.  In the post she comes to the defense of Anne Rice.  As you know, in the no-place of the blogosphere, people and thoughts are trashed, vilified, anathematized forever and ever by just about anyone who doesn't like what you write - as if you were speaking ex-cathedra on a matter of faith and morals.  Yet sometimes - oftentimes you are simply working through a problem - sorting things out as it were - not unlike a sort of examination of 'social' conscience.  In the meantime, some zealot for the inquisition happens by, reports his suspicions to his comrades, puts your writings  on his watch list and monitors everything you say - even in the com-boxes of blogs you may occasionally visit.  (Obviously they visit the same blogs.)  But I digress... let's read what Ms. Enbrethiliel has to say:
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Thinking out loud, online.
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The difference between autobiographical writing and blogging is that one of them has an ending and that the other has only a time stamp.

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When I was still writing on my old blog, I could write about the same things over and over again for months. I'd look at them from different angles . . . see how they handled new writing styles . . . try to figure out what it was I really thought about them. And whenever I believed my mind had finally been made up, a new insight would come to me--via a comment or another blog I had been reading--and this process of thinking out loud (or thinking online) would begin anew.

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I've been doing my thinking "on paper" since I started keeping a journal as a teenager. Until I graduated to HTML, I filled up almost twenty notebooks with just my ramblings. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages. I still have those old journals; now and then I remind myself that I want to burn them. They are like so many old newspapers to me: the headlines, the editorials, the birth and death announcements, and the funnies of my life. Like old newspapers, they lose their relevance once the next day's news arrives.
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Yes, the latest news is always hatched from the old news--or at least it is when I get to do journalism. I insist on continuity--and on context. And I wonder why, when the new contains the old, it is necessary to keep the shells.

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Blogging was a new medium that completely changed the way I covered my own life. It used to be that my thoughts were not published until they had been thoroughly worked out--beaten into sharp swords or aged into a perfect vintage in the smithies and wine cellars of my mind. Nobody ever read anything before it was as perfect as it could be. I might have an editorial fit six months later and want to rewrite the whole thing, but it would have had all the integrity of the moment, in its own moment. But what blogging does is give everything I write--even the half forged weapons and the newly pressed grapes--the same integrity. That can be, as Anne Rice must know, a very risky way to be a writer. - Finish reading.
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Something important that will never be finished.
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I think I know what Enbrethiliel is saying...  if not she can correct me.  I suppose I could add more to her thoughts, but I think what she wrote is enough for now.  Sometimes I just want to stop writing, painting, expressing my thoughts, documenting my experience, but there is a need within me - perhaps like stones crying out.  In and through this occupation, my hardened heart seems to return to flesh - exhibiting signs of life... albeit like a bruised reed, a smoldering wick. 
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I think we all have to be very careful in writing about other people's sins - sometimes ours may be worse.
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Photo:  Argument of the Month Club Dinner.  (Oh I'm just kidding!)  It's a Chris West demo video for a TOB presentation on acceptable foreplay in marriage.  (I'm kidding!)