For me, collage is the method that gets closest to depicting how I actually think on the page. (Next closest would be drawing, or, more specifically, comics, diagramming, mind-mapping, etc.) Writing, on the other hand, is conveying to others what I think on the page. There’s a difference.

So I was quite pleased when my friend Kio sent me this excerpt from Barbara Maria Stafford’s Visual Analogy: Consciousness As the Art of Connecting:

“Whether participating in a common outer life or making sense of the varieties of inner experience, understanding occurs as the consequence of an expenditure of psychic and physical energy compelling disparate things to converge. The in­betweenness of assemblage—those body­object amalgams composed of tossed scraps, found objects, organic and inorganic remnants—embodies this stunning spectrum of relocatable patterns available to human subjectivity. Collage, as the process of transforming ephemera by cutting and pasting them into momentarily stable configurations, continues to be a particularly effective technique for capturing the chimera of consciousness in action. We literally see how the brain organizes incoming visual stimuli by witnessing how perceptual organization begins by distinguishing salient features, to recombine bits and pieces and process them unequally in the mind’s eye.”

(Emphasis mine.)