Don't be childish? But what is the alternative?

It took me four years to learn to paint like Raphael but a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.
--Pablo Picasso.

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How true of many good things in life! We adults forget how to play like a child, nap like a baby, run/dance/sing with abandon, or...wait a minute. If it took Picasso that long to LEARN, didn't he have to work hard at learning for a very long time? Or, work at un-learning his bad habits, his hang-ups, his not-merely-unproductive but anti-productive self-criticism?

Gee, I think of writing as a craft that needs to be studied, learned, and honed like a fine knife that naturally loses some edge with normal use; I guess there's another side, a learned freedom to do "Gonzo writing," as the (nut-case?) writer Hunter Thompson did...no limits, less worry about the facts than the feelings--ahh, that brings things full circle to Picasso. Pablo Picasso didn't paint what he "saw," literally (I hope!) but he painted what he was trying to see, or, perhaps even more accurately, what he wanted you and me to see...and feel...and understand.

The painters whom I've long regarded as rather, ahem, dippy, to put it politely...are trying to make their audience see things from a different perspective: thus Picasso's cubism is a way of looking at life through more than one lens. But was it all "gonzo" for Picasso? One of his contemporaries said, "Picasso studies an object the way a surgeon dissects a corpse." (Apollinaire.) So, intense studiousness, but also intensely and intentionally breaking out of the customary ways of...painting, seeing, and doing.

Some writers (whom I deplore) are trying to do the same thing as the modernist painters...so, I'll keep reading widely and endeavor to keep my eyes, ears, and mind a bit more open to new ways of looking at things. I may even try to write a little more crazily--eek! And, start more sentences with "and" and end more a preposition with!