More help, today, from Annie:
“The work is not the vision itself, certainly. It is not the vision filled in, as if it had been a coloring book. It is not the vision reproduced in time; that were impossible. It is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem. You try– you try every time– to reproduce the vision, to let your light so shine before men. But you can only come along with your bushel and hide it.”
-Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Sigh.