I don't think this is really a 'different understanding' but I was writing in the forum yesterday about inner 'noise' during prayer and I mentioned something specious about God 'transforming this into music'.
today it occurred to me that this interior noise is the imagination at its ceaseless work and that 'art' is a way of transforming this very noise (a sort of raw material) into 'something coherent'. can it be said that art and prayer seek to 'do' the same thing albeit in quite different ways? the way of prayer is beyond the noise and does nothing with the noise except to give it into the hands of God. but art is a fashioning of the noise into coherent shape so that we can then be 'freed' from it.

another thought I had today was that there is no inner life as such - no spiritual life - there is only me and the 'other' . . . . . my spiritual life, when I am blessed with awareness (although let's face it, it doesn't always seem such a blessing either), is you, glimpsed through noise and cloud.