Earlier today I was telling my friend Liz about building art for Burning Man. I described how the creation process feels different when you build something you know you will destroy. As we talked, I told her the story of building (and burning) my unicorns. I remembered how I felt building them. I sucked at building them. It was a lot of work and I had to try multiple times. I persevered. Only in the end to strap explosives and fireworks to the wood frames, douse in gasoline and give to the fire.
I stopped a beat while telling her the story. This concept, building something up to burn it down, came down on my head like a frying pan epiphany. Of course!
I was reminded of the paradox of peeling the onion when Shane Carruth did his director Q&A for Upstream Color. He asked, "When you peel back the layers of the onion, what do you have left?"
That's the problem with the onion. The obvious thought is that you are peeling each layer of the onion to get to the core of the onion. And there's another layer below it, until there is no more onion left to peel.
The answer is a simple, yet profound shift of thinking. The layers are the onion.
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