This tension between being swathed in the online world and going to a place with “true names” feels like one of the main contentions of anyone doing “deep work” today.

Hell, right now, I had to get out of bed and come downstairs and almost break my toe on a kettlebell to then lean over and type this out in a totally unergonomic posture. But this is

Turning something from an idea into a reality can make it seem smaller. It changes from unearthly to earthly. The imagination has no limits. The physical world does. The work exists in both.

Art requires access to the imagination, a notoriously difficult place to visit. The imagination fuels an idea. The artist acts urgently, often impulsively, on that idea but brings conscious rigor to the evaluation of what the imagination has spewed. Ultimately, experience, intellect, insight, and drive enable them to shape the work and then to edit

If the upper realm is, as Plato suggested, the sphere of perfect love, truth, justice, and beauty, then the artist seeks to call down the magic of this world and to create, by dint of labor and luck, the closest-to-sublime simulacra of those qualities that he or she can.