Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp's Diary

Wednesday 10 March 1999

The trouble with knowing what

09.45 The trouble with knowing what you want is, you just might get it.

This is one of Guitar Craft's useful guiding principles. Toyah & I received a call yesterday from a friend of ours who is a superb young horticulturalist & garden planner. He had applied for three jobs, attended all interviews, and was not accepted. Dejection. Rejection. My own upbeat take on this was that a far better, creative future is waiting for him than anything he can imagine as possible.

The creative future can't be forecast in terms that we are able to forecast: the future available to forecasts is history projected forwards, or a kind of expectation. The creative future provides something radically new which enters the picture.

On the dust-jacket of "Sherborne" is a quote of Mr. Bennett to AGE Blake at Sherborne: "Of course, you know that I don't know what I am doing!". A corresponding notion from Guitar Craft is: "If you know what you're doing, you don't know what you're doing".

Genius is something like a divine unknowing expressed through masterful understanding, self-control & capacity. Mastery is like "the assumption of innocence within a context of experience". Once again, an unknowing expressed through understanding. The tangible, almost physically oppressive weight of demand, expectation & insistence which accompanies "fan" interest cripples the available present moment. Which means, puts up a three-foot gate & Berlin Wall to a future which actually has value, and is available.

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