There is a state that the first hour of making sometimes produces and sometimes does not. It is not mystical and it is not dramatic — it would not read as significant to anyone observing from outside. The marks keep coming, one after another, and the relationship between making one and beginning the next compresses until there is no discernible gap. The hand moves and the form arrives and the hand moves again, and the distinction between intention and execution — between deciding and doing — becomes difficult to locate.
This is the state that Csikszentmihalyi’s work describes empirically and that the contemplative traditions have described in their own vocabularies for several thousand years. What interests me is not the state in itself — which is available through many practices and carries no special significance — but what it does to the mark. The marks made in this state carry less revision, less second-guessing, less of the quality that I think of as the mark explaining itself to an imagined viewer. They are addressed more purely to the act of being made.