"What is chance, what is luck, what are things
that you get from the universe that you can't really explain?"
Amy Tan, TED Lecture, Feb. 2008
Tan sets the perception of randomness against her mother's sense that everything has an explanation, yet she states that ambiguity, a lack of clarity (like her mother's or even greater), is part of her writing process as it should be. Still, she finds herself being pointed in directions, and she wonders how things happen, why they happen, and how she herself makes them happen. She has observed that the more she notices strange occurrences the more they happen. Creative people, she suggests, are "multi-dimensional." Her resolve: "I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe as the creator of that universe."
Perhaps what Tan is saying is two-fold: one, creative people don't exist in multiple dimensions or as multiply-dimensional without willful engagement of other dimensions or realms and, two, that their sense of what is real is partly influenced by their own involvement in creation of their universe. Accordingly, my cosmology would be I think both what exists and what I see (or otherwise sense) and acknowledge.
Deep stuff. Listen to Tan's lecture here.
