A blank canvas or page is most terrifying and exciting because the potential is never greater than in that state. Everything is in the mind at that point, and in the mind there is a perfect to speak of. Committing the pen to the page, so to speak, can be near impossible. I would know, what with all the ideas-for-blogs that I've let slip away.
And yet, beginning is necessary. In what I've learned from art-making, mistakes are inevitable and are meant to be incorporated - nothing is ever ruined, because everything is part of the process. In fact, the end product, when there is one, is fuller and richer for having these mistakes, because there is more to tell. And more drama, so to speak.
The great artist then, takes it all in stride. There isn't the one idea that begins and ends, but rather possible ideas beginning all the time, as offshoots of the original, ideas that would not have been able to present themselves if the hiccups along the way hadn't occurred. It is in experimentation that there is invention - and an untold amount of inventions have occurred as the result of accidents.
Making art isn't unlike living life (fully), or loving another (truly). Life and loves are not perfect, and incorporating flaws as possible departure points for beauty only makes for a greater work of happiness.
I say this because it is said that women are prone to idealize their loves, casting them as a future perfect, tensely awaited. A love that is pure and of-the-mind, a blank space unpainted or brush-stroked anxiously to match.
I am not without these mind-images. They are beautiful. He is patient and kind and we are intimate - precisely because I don't know him well enough to know otherwise. Instead of loving him, I love that he is someone new, and we are safe because my mind has made it so. But I want to love him anyway, even at the risk of losing these images, because it is the only thing that's real.
I have loved before, anyway. And I have to say, those images don't go away, not completely. In fact, they'll downright haunt you, until the dichotomy of mind and reality is too much to bear and you beg for everything to be truly blank.
Except it doesn't work that way. Our collective flaws might obscure the page and you might stop, but I will begin, and begin again, and love anyway, and make a mess, and have a mess made out of me, and begin, and begin, and begin.