August 28

One of the difficulties with the creative life is that when we have creative breakthroughs, they may look and even be experienced as breakdowns. Our normal, ordinary way of seeing ourselves and the world suddenly goes on tilt, and as it does, a new way of seeing and looking at things comes toward us. Sometimes this “new vision” can seem almost hallucinogenic in its persuasive shifting of perspective. It is as though we have had a strobe light sweep across our experience and freeze into bas relief a certain previously unquestioned assumption. The creative journey is characterized not by a muzzy and hazy retreat from reality but by the continual sorting and reordering and structuring of reality into new forms and new relationships. As artists, we “see things differently.” In part, this is because we are looking.