Last week, I left my solitary writing table in Washington, DC, and took the train to Boston to visit a friend whose creative journey began with classical piano performance and now, a short lifetime later, has found a waystation in video art.

Reunited, she was eager to show me the fruits of her current project. As she guided me through the low rabbit warren of graduate studios in which her workspace is tucked. I passed open studios filled with odd sights: a giant red cage, an altar to John Wilkes Booth, poster-size pictures of a woman re-enacting her own childhood snapshots.

To enter my friend’s studio, I had to pass through the filmy entrails of a rare white parachute. Its rope was tacked to the wall next to another, identical parachute, on whose diaphanous body she had used magenta ink, a mixture of wine and vinegar, to scrawl a barely-legible story.

Beyond this parade of silky, sprawling fabric, the studio was almost bare. Most of my friend’s creative process happens elsewhere: she has jumped from planes, ferreted out conspiracy theories, and interviewed a host of stiff military types and one suddenly sobbing older man. She has spent weeks cobbling together footage of paratroopers sailing over battlefields, and long nights hunched over her piano, writing haunting orchestration to accompany their flight.

The final product is a series of six carefully wrought films, hidden inside a squat orange hard-drive that she guards with her life. Sitting down at the studio’s empty desk, she plugged the hard-drive into her silver PowerBook, opened up several files, and proceeded to screen her work for me.

The films were intensely beautiful. But on a practical creative level, they were also baffling. Several times, I woke from watching to hear my inner logistician tallying–and bemoaning–the host of cameras, computer programs, light kits, and people she had corralled, as well as the contingencies and emergencies that each element provoked.

I found myself longing for the ascetic simplicity of paper and pen. But at the same time, I marveled at how physical and collaborative her creativity is, and, despite similar artistic drives, how utterly distinct our preparations and processes are.

When the films ended, my friend turned to me and asked: “What do you think?”

Struggling to think of feedback, I took a minute to scrape the bottom of the mental barrel for the odd term or theory of conceptual film. I hemmed, I hawed, and finally, I talked like a writer.

“They’re like incarnated poems,” I said, mapping out the images and sounds that seemed to call back to each other in the ways that rhyme and rhythm would link verse.

As I spoke, the films seemed to striate into half-visible lines, the repeated images like refrains, key colors and phrases like a poem’s backbone of words that, when intuited, help the writer slough off all that is not necessary.

For the next hour, my friend and I worked toward each other like two people speaking different languages–trying for cognates, making elaborate hand gestures, laughing when the attempt at communication went totally awry.

But we finally found a common language and, in the process, guided each other through an accidental stretching, strengthening exercise that left each of us invigorated.