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 somehow shower a 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 or complementary? The question, which suggests something like a creative sanctum shimmering a few meters above the room in which you punch a clock or schedule a meeting, assumes that aesthetic experience is categorically different from everyday experience, and that muse-fueled invention floats apart from earthier forms of productivity.