Art-making is mysterious. It's not alchemy, it's work. But the moment that the work really becomes art is actually quite unknowable, or if it's not unknowable, it's always shifting, and with each new moment, new directions emerge. So nothing ever gets pinned down. All this is (I think, maybe) one of the reasons that writers are so cagey about talking about how the work gets done. We'll talk about what we need nearby, the music we listen to, our process. But those odd, magical weird moments where you finally have made something amazing--those we don't really understand. And we writers get to do the art-making all by ourselves, which is maybe why our implosions are felt less in the larger artistic communities.
Theater-making is even more mysterious. Everyone has to run on all cylinders at the same time, with the same intentions--basically--and eventually everyone on stage begins chasing that thing that you all made together. Weird.
Am I rambling? It's been a long day.
I'm home now, returned from Upstate with the circus. It took only about 4 hours to get from there to New York, and then we spent about an hour and half going around the space of about 5 city blocks, because of 1) the Holland Tunnel, and 2) Who knows what else. It was a fruitful, eventful, sometimes beautiful, sometimes maddening trip. Like art-making is.
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