McCullers images the artist as a screen on which is projected a series of emerging and expanding stills whose flickering breaks dislocate the continuity of causality; or because the artist sees and is seen, he is the eye of a golden bird as well as the observer of the reflections of that golden eye. Such a state is tyrannically relationless and unwilled, for nothing is translated or translatable into anything except itself. Things tenaciously remain things, feelings, feelings; and nothing is symbolic of anything, yet. If any conversions do occur they do so only under the melding power of the unconscious to animate things with feelings and to concretize feelings with things. The initial creative process then to McCullers is the special art of dreaming while awake.

Significantly, that semi-awake state is for McCullers predominantly musical and visual, not verbal, and seems to flourish at the dawn of...