The act of producing art can be anything but romantic. To escape the blank page, the only thing on earth as passive as yourself, you cast about for distractions, half-convinced that avoiding your project will shower some sort of mystical growth hormone on your ideas. Yet for some artists, such as William Carlos Williams, life and art were more than each other's palate cleansers. The poet doctor saw his dual vocations as mysteriously fused. 'They are two parts of a whole,' he contended in his 1967 autobiography. 'It is not two jobs at all . . . one rests the man when the other fatigues him.' As a physician, Williams developed an antenna for the 'inarticulate poems' emanating from his patients, even as he resolved to 'use the material I knew' from practicing medicine in his writing. What, then, is the real relationship between art and trade? Agonistic? Complementary? The question, suggesting something like a creative sanctum shimmering a few meters above the room in which you punch a clock or schedule a meeting, supposes that aesthetic experience is categorically different from everyday experience, and that must-fueled invention floats apart from earthlier forms of productivity.