When it comes to the creative spark, time waits for – everyone
Poet and author John Kinsella explores the idea of creativity and duration, pointing out that the struggle is real.
Artists inevitably struggle with duration, willingly or otherwise, when making works. Time makes as much as it takes and duration is the continuance of that making.
Seeing a work through, after the initial idea takes hold, might be the hardest part of the process, especially as life intervenes.
So many works are created under duress. Giving an idea shape and structure occupies time and space, and that in itself (that loss or, optimistically, gain of time) becomes part of the art.
Works incomplete at death, posthumous publication, parts of a massive idea that couldn’t find a final shape (as was desired by French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé with his Grand Oeuvre), component poems and even a few notes. But not the final form, not The Book.
Goethe worked for almost 60 years on his version of Faust, from the Ur-Faust through to the publication of Faust part two in 1831 – and represents one of the definitive examples of a life’s obsession with a theme or idea, along with an obvious commitment (or obsession) to realise an artistic vision.
As one of the most highly regarded works of world literature, this is obviously a marker, but it’s far from unique as an example of creative persistence.
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Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji (1021AD) is said to have taken at least 10 years to write. On the other hand, awaiting execution in prison, Boethius wrote his De consolatione philosophiae in a few months in 523AD.
Imprisonment so often necessitates secrecy and assistance in getting a work written and out to the world, both as an act of political resistance and record but also as a creative and spiritual safety valve. There are numerous works of duration that contest the jailers’ cliché of someone “doing their time” by addressing both the contradictions of confinement and the need to act in the external world.
There are works created in prison, and also works that have horrifically and unjustly led to imprisonment — from Oscar Wilde’s unsent letter to Bosie Douglas written in Reading Gaol (not published in full until 1962) after a struggle to obtain pen, paper and the “right” to “write”, through to the case of a poet being jailed ostensibly because of publishing what was perceived as a challenge to the authorities.
An example of this is Jack Mapanje’s 1981 Malawi poetry collection, Of Chameleons and Gods. Mapanje’s poems altered the nature of personal and communal time, leading to the theft of that time from the poet through his imprisonment. On the back cover of that book we read, in the words of Mapanje: “The Verse in this volume spans some ten turbulent years in which I have been attempting to find a voice (or voices) as a way of hanging on to some sanity. Obviously where voices are too easily muffled, this is a difficult task to set oneself. This explains why the product of these energies sometimes seems to be too cryptic to be decoded.”
And that was what came before incarceration.
And if Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych (1490-1510) is another example of such integrity of labour, it’s nothing on the anticipation of John Cage’s 1985 piece (revised for organ in 1992), As Slow as Possible’/ ‘Organ2/ASLSP which, though played across various time periods depending on performance, has been picked up by the John Cage Organ Foundation, in Halberstadt, to be played across 639 years.
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Time is part of composition in any artform
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a favourite in our house, started contemplating what would become her great verse novel, Aurora Leigh, as early as 1844, with its eventual publication in 1857.
Time is part of composition in any artform, and though the automatism of the surrealists might have seemed quick, the images and ideas that informed the unconscious was a life’s work, never mind a particular text’s journey to the world beyond the ecology of the trance-like moment — duration, again. And the same applies to psychography — automatic writing.
I have spent 40 years working on versions of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (1308-1321) and will continue doing so until my last creative moment.
That’s a big project, of open duration, but there are so many smaller ones happening at the same time that parallel that larger work. And then I have my Graphology poems, which have accumulated since the mid-’90s and will, I hope, continue to do so. Writing poems is always interconnected.
Much of what we’ve experienced long before in life becomes part of what we write, in the here and now. I was reminded of this today while working on a draft of a poem set in the Shothole Canyon of the Cape Range National Park in Western Australia, which I visited with my father back in the early ’70s.
I’d written a symbolist kind of poem about it when I was 18, but am back to the same moment again at 62 with a very different take in mind. For me, now, there’s a politics to visiting Country and that has to be noted in some way in the poem. Further, memory is far more stretched and all that’s happened in my life necessarily intervenes. And my father is no longer alive. Everything changes. A different poem manifests, but it’s an old poem, too. It is a single work and will remain a work in progress.
James Joyce referred to Finnegans Wake as the “work in progress” over its 16 years of writing, though it is now locked into its 1939 publication reveal. Yet as many of us continue to interleave our lives with that work, it remains alive as a proliferating work in progress.
Over the past three or four years, I have been illustrating The Wake with coloured pencil drawings, just as I have done with Dante’s Comedy, and that becomes a work without closure, a work that’s ultimately unfinishable. One illustration per canto (or section or page or line) is just a measurement. What I hope for “eventually”, whatever that might mean, is an accumulation of images that make a life.
Henri Bergson’s ideas (élan vital) around duration are interesting here. I wonder if we might apply them in part to describing the time it took for Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? We might consider the amount of work, the labour involved, the space it occupied and the time it took (1508-1512) from the moment of commission/conception to completion.
But compelled by time, it’s the duration, the growth of a life that makes possible a communal sharing, a communal life, that so interests me.
John Kinsella’s most recent short story collection is Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024). His new collection of poetry, Ghost of Myself (UQP) will be out in July.