"Loose as Ashes"

At the dentist's office this week, I enjoyed a half hour of nitrous oxide which set my mind loose a bit more than usual.

This loosey-goosey-ness is a state I want to be able to produce and enhance, without aid of a mask and a tank and a dentist. It's at the heart of creativity. I think it's the reason that so many people who are good at one art form are also pretty decent in another. I have a book called "Doubly Gifted," a collection of the paintings of well-known writers. John Updike paints well and so do a lot of others.

My theory: once the mind is freed of the usual rigid connections--how a nose is supposed to look--then it's possible to see how a particular nose looks. And once frozen mental images and standard connections are dismantled, new combinations can occur.

It's a bit like doing the puzzle "Word Jumbles," the one where you unscramble letters to make a word. I visualize the letters greased so that they can slide in every direction, take new positions. Some days I can do all the word jumbles in the paper at a glance; other days the letters stay rigidly in their place. I've never checked to see how my writing correlates with my word jumble facility at a particular moment, but I wouldn't be surprised to find a connection.

Some famous baseball player--can't remember his name--said that the right way to be when you step up to bat is "loose as ashes."

How do you get that way? I find that exercise helps.

By the way, my brand-new, week-old research on my first-ever biography is sailing. This woman was a living mystery.