When reading your post Uli I was reminded of a post of mine in the topic of The philosopher's desire where I mentioned the way Matisse and Cezanne related to unfinished work.
"One can compare Matisse and Cezanne. For Cezanne, paintings were unfinished. He left white spots, and often didn't sign them. For Matisse, they are in a sense always finished. Always finished and always (re)painted over(again)."

Do we see our work as done after we release it? This is perhaps the point of view behind Frankenstein - you create the work and release it to the world as its own being.
Or do we see it as a beginning of a life, but one which we can alter.

You mention Emily Dickinson. I'll quote, unchopped as you suggest (for people who want it chopped, just notice the Capital letters):
A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.

I think that for a poet a word never has a fixed meaning and the possibility to redefine in the last line a word uttered in the first one is always there.

Another example, similar to your Scholem example, is Montaigne who has only one book, Essays, which he continuously edited and re-edited after publication. Montaigne added new essays for the new publication, but also interspersed many new lines in the old essays. He describes his book as a self portrait (something which is probably true to many artists) and to keep that self-portrait correct he constantly needed to repaint it. He didn't erase anything though, only added. Perhaps as you can't delete your past, but you gain new understandings of it.

I think one's comfort with releasing a creative work has to do with one's comfort of releasing an unfinished work, and the consequences of that release. One still needs to feel that the work has achieved some kind of reasonably fixed state.

Thank you for these fascinating examples.
I like to see and experience art in all their different stages.
In painting, one of my favorite paintings in the National Gallery of London is this study painting by Leonardo Da Vinci.



For me, it is both rough and tender, and I can’t imagine liking it more in what would have been the final stage of this creation, oil painting.
Sometimes sketches and rough drafts can be more moving than a finished product.

I recently watched Ed Harris' biopic of Jackson Pollock and this very same question was posed to Pollock of his art in an interview. How do you know when a painting is done? His response: How do you know when you are finished having sex?

I can't be certain that line was ever uttered by Pollock. In fact I somehow doubt it. In every artistic endeavor I've ever set out on, the end has never felt like an orgasm. Maybe it's because I've never felt like I came to a climatic finish. How could I? How could any artist? It's all about that word we know doesn't exist, perfection. There is always going to be another edit to make or another addition to improve on but you'll never achieve a final end because art is only ever an imitation of life.

But still, I sort of know what he means. That there is a final sense of separation to the artist and his work. And it's this separation that needs to be felt out sincerely or else whatever was right and true about the art will be lost.

There was an essay I read a long time ago about Alberto Giacometti the sculptor. I unfortunately can't remember now who wrote the essay because it was remarkably beautiful, but it went something like this. For a summer in his career every day Giacometti had a handsome friend of his come to his studio to pose. It was for a painting and as the summer went on Giacometti was becoming entirely anxious about his piece as his model dutifully showed up day after day. It turns out that the model would come and pose and go home and at night Giacometti would continue at work maybe on the tip of the nose or the lobe of the ear and then suddenly he would feel the sudden urge to start from scratch and he would erase it all, nose, ear, face altogether. The next day he would start over only better. But it would happen again. and again. And by the end of the summer the painting had gone through so many lives it was as if the subject had lived and died inside the canvas.

This is a story of editing and of appreciation of detail and of the never-ending pursuit for perfection in art. It's hard to edit. Incredibly hard. It would be so much easier if as artists our streams of consciousness were already perfectly tuned, if we didn't have to go back in and correct them, or make them better. After a surge of creativity off the top of the head it can feel as if we've just come out the otherside of sex and maybe that's how Pollock painted, but how should we categorize the editing process?