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Dissolution
Apr. 2nd, 2005 10:24 amCan't remember if I posted this. I was interested in this quote that I ran into in the Feb 14&21 New Yorker in "The Misfit," a profile by Mark Singer of the television writer David Milch. Milch quotes William James in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" (which I had also run into in a book my brother gave me about the painter George Inness):
"James says that every vision that ever came to anyone is prefaced by a sense of dissolution of the self. It's the fragmentation of ego that allowed what he called the oceanic sense to flow in. I find that when I'm merely thinking about a scene I'm in an egoist state, which is the opposite of the state of being where you suppress the ego and go out in spirit to the characters. What writing should be is a going out in spirit."
"James says that every vision that ever came to anyone is prefaced by a sense of dissolution of the self. It's the fragmentation of ego that allowed what he called the oceanic sense to flow in. I find that when I'm merely thinking about a scene I'm in an egoist state, which is the opposite of the state of being where you suppress the ego and go out in spirit to the characters. What writing should be is a going out in spirit."