On Creating - On the Brush, the Maker, and Love Insisting On a Form

An essay on making, and on what the tool has to do with the hand. It begins with an education arrived at late, and with līlā — the Vedantic reading of creation as divine play rather than a problem to be solved — and moves through technē, the Greek word that held craft and art together before we separated them. Heidegger's warning about technology as a mode of revealing sits at the centre: the danger and the saving power folded into the same thing. The essay's answer is that the tool only ever amplifies the hand that holds it, and that a brush is a brush whatever it is made of. From there it turns to Dickinson's drawers, Plato's divine madness, and the fear of never being a poet, and closes on Nāda Brahma, Babel, and Diotima's account of love as the longing to give birth in beauty — that we make not to be remembered but because love insists on taking a form.