Srinivas Raman on Substack

Just today after I read this piece, I also happened to listen to an encore interview of Ocean Vuong in which he says the following echoing the line you quote from Philip Guston: Ocean Vuong expresses similar sentiments this way: “As a maker, you get to that moment, you enter a room and you start working…You do these rituals to get yourself into a space removed from yourself, removed from your personhood into a deeper mysterious selfhood. You are no longer (a) person, (a) species but a consciousness and when you start working really well your heroes walk out of the room. Your family, your mothers, your brothers, they start to walk out of the room. Your enemies walk out of the room. Your bullies, the people that doubt you. When you are really hitting the horizon of your inquiry, you are asking the questions that can’t be answered, but you are showing up every day to it, you are chasing that horizon (and) pretty soon when you are really hitting it, even you walk out of the room and you are floating. You are just a consciousness following the question. And that is the greatest feeling on earth.