"On these days of creativity I can feel it already: how the husks slide off the things and how everything becomes trusting and forgets all manner of disguise. Moments of creativity are like twilights after heavy summer days. All things are like young girls, white and gentle and of a smiling sadness. Until they suddenly nestle up against you with a strange, impetuous tenderness and tremble like does in flight and cry like children dreaming: deeply and drunkenly and breathlessly. As if they wanted to say: 'Oh, we really aren't the way we are. We lied. Forgive us.'
Rainer Maria Rilke.
I had a breakthrough today, and I am filled with a raw, untrammeled sense of power (as illusory as that may be). The words come to me and I hardly know what to do with them. Which got me to thinking about this beautiful reflection from Rilke. So I thought I would take a moment to share it with you and pose this question:
Do you feel, as Rilke does, that at those moments of greatest creativity, the world sheds its wrinkled skin and you come to the reality of things? Or do you believe that when you create you are adding illusion to illusion, putting more masks on an infinite mask?
Rainer Maria Rilke.
I had a breakthrough today, and I am filled with a raw, untrammeled sense of power (as illusory as that may be). The words come to me and I hardly know what to do with them. Which got me to thinking about this beautiful reflection from Rilke. So I thought I would take a moment to share it with you and pose this question:
Do you feel, as Rilke does, that at those moments of greatest creativity, the world sheds its wrinkled skin and you come to the reality of things? Or do you believe that when you create you are adding illusion to illusion, putting more masks on an infinite mask?
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
As for your Rilke-related question above: I know that when I'm writing at my best (to my eye, at least), I'm keen on all sorts of "masks," but at the same time, the more artifice (wordplay, intertextual reference, etc.) there is to the surface of the work, the more I feel like I'm able to actually put forth what I need / want to say. Hardly a revolutionary concept, of course, and I'm not even sure if I articulated it clearly, but there you have it.