I don't know how to write it

Where do I start? After what feels like weeks of moving, and months of non-productivity (and yes, these are mostly just feelings...), it falls upon me to write something New. I want it to be Bright and Shiny and Entrancing and to flit around the reader like the music does that I am writing about. Every time I start something new I feel this, and it is as if an image emerges from behind a fog in the distance, its contours becoming briefly perceptible before fading and shifting again...like the Seven Sisters, you can only see it when one looks to the side of it.

But the fading and shifting are relentless, the shape of the work-yet-undone taunts me, teases me, declares itself to be there and yet refuses to be caught and tamed. And so I feel, as I do every time, a sense of impending failure. Not that the work will be bad, or unworthy, just that it won't quite hit the mark. And so I feel pushed and pulled and stretched in all directions as I try to see the shape of this quicksilvery thing that may not even be there, and understand all the time that I will never catch it anyway.

All the usual tricks from school are useless...mindmaps, spider diagrams...too organised and logical for this. Maybe that's where I go wrong, though. I do in fact tend towards the principle of organising, explaining, clarifying...and what I really want is an interplay of language and sounds and textures and senses. I sometimes get close to that here in the Hall, but that's a different arena. Here failure is acceptable...I am hidden enough and this is casual enough that there is less pressure to Get It Right. But there, in the World, in Work, what I say and do will haunt me for years if I get it wrong.

So I start the writing with fear, which is why I have spent all afternoon in my office not writing, because I am screaming to write something like the unearthly symphonic mass that fills my ears and is the subject of the work, and yet I feel I will inevitably fall into the same old trap of Clarity and Safety that I suspect is more likely to garner approval from my audience on the day.
I suspect we all have aspirations for our work that exceeds what we manage to achieve, so I don't pretend to be special or different. But oh, such ambition, to want to be rewarded for pulling it off!