“Breathing rarified air, special and pure, like on Mount Everest.”

Clouds 4, originally uploaded by Poundstone.

I read an interview with Lucinda Williams a few years ago and remember her saying that oftentimes, the take of a song that ends up making it onto an album is the take she does when she’s dog tired; the last take.

About a year ago, my friend Craig Laurie (who has just put out a new album) said he had experienced the same thing during his recording process.

A few nights ago, I watched Au Hasard Balthazar, and afterwards a documentary that featured the director of the film, Robert Bresson, saying he sometimes had the non-actors he cast rehearse their lines up to fifty times before he shot a scene.

And this afternoon on NPR’s “This I Believe,” dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison said:

“Once, I had a dancer who was a beautiful dancer with a gorgeous body. But I couldn't get him to express himself. He had to go further. He had to tell me his journey, his emotional center, but he wouldn't. One time we were in rehearsal. He had a five-minute solo. He did it once. He was breathing hard. I said, ‘Do it again.’ The second time he was so exhausted he had no choice: He had to go deeper. He was honest. He arrived. It was exquisite.”

I don’t really know what to make of this idea, which seems to have been following me around for several years. It's counter-intuitive that work produced in some state of fatigue or exhaustion (as opposed to zeal or frenzy) would turn out to be the most excellent work produced, but apparently it happens. And, going by the products in the examples above, work produced in a depleted state of body may have a more intense spiritual resonance than would be possible otherwise. Or, to borrow the phrase Judith Jamison used to describe a rehearsal studio space, the work could make us feel we are “breathing rarified air, special and pure, like on Mount Everest.”