Anyone who knows me knows that I have a very complicated relationship with time. Hours can pass in a blink when I'm working, but seconds are critical when I'm sprinting after a bus to take me to work. I'm always running against some clock, internal or standardized.
Currently, I'm reading Jeanette Winterson's "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?" I've always enjoyed her work. I love her writing, her perspective, her insight on being a woman and being an artist.
A chapter—or interlude—titled "Intermission" struck a chord.
She writes,
In my work I have pushed against the weight of clock time, of calendar time, of linear unravellings ... In our inner world, we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously.
... I recognize that life has an inside as well as an outside and that events separated by years lie side by side imaginatively and emotionally.
Creative time bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.
I don't make art to have something that exists beyond myself. I make art to get to an essence of what being human means.
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