Kalampedia

1.

In the winter of 1797, Samuel Taylor Coleridge woke from a dream.

He had fallen asleep in his chair — possibly assisted, as was his habit, by a quantity of laudanum — while reading a sentence in an old travel book about Kublai Khan and his pleasure palace at Xanadu. He slept for three hours. And in those three hours, two to three hundred lines of vivid, fully formed poetry arrived in his mind, complete with imagery, rhythm, and sound. He woke and immediately began to write.

He got fifty-four lines down before a visitor knocked on his door. A man from the nearby village of Porlock, on some forgettable piece of business. Coleridge dealt with him — it took an hour, perhaps more — and returned to his desk.

The rest of the poem was gone. Simply gone. What remained was Kubla Khan, one of the most ravishing fragments in the English language, and a note Coleridge attached to it explaining, with something between embarrassment and wonder, what had happened. He never recovered the missing lines. He never quite recovered from losing them.

2.

Elizabeth Gilbert opens Big Magic — her book about creative living, published in 2015 — with a theory that would have made Coleridge feel considerably better about the man from Porlock. Her argument, stated plainly and without apology, is that ideas are not generated by human minds. They are, in some sense, alive. They move through the world looking for human partners willing to bring them into being. When they find someone receptive — someone who has prepared themselves through curiosity and attention and practice — they make contact. And if that person is ready, something gets made.

If they are not ready, or if something interrupts the meeting, the idea moves on. It finds someone else.

Gilbert tells a story about this that is strange enough to stay with you. The poet Ruth Stone, who grew up in rural Virginia, described to Gilbert how she would be working in the fields when she would feel and hear a poem coming toward her across the landscape — a thunderous roaring, she called it, as if something enormous was moving through the grass. She had to run to the farmhouse to find paper and pencil and catch it before it passed through her and out the other side. Sometimes she made it. Sometimes she only caught the tail end — arriving breathless at her desk and grabbing the last lines as they disappeared. Once or twice she missed entirely and felt the poem continue on its way, looking, she imagined, for another poet.

3.

You can take this literally or you can take it as a way of talking about something real that resists more literal description. Either way, something in it rings true to almost anyone who has ever made anything.

Because the experience of genuine creative work — as distinct from competent, effortful, produced work — does often feel like receiving rather than generating. The painter who says the painting told her what it needed. The novelist who describes his characters making decisions he hadn’t planned. The musician who wakes at three in the morning with something fully formed in her head. These are not affectations. They are attempts to describe an experience that the conventional model of creativity — person has idea, person executes idea — does not quite capture.

Gilbert’s word for this is enchantment. She uses it seriously, not decoratively. She means a state in which something larger than your ordinary thinking self is available to you. And her argument is that this state can be cultivated — not commanded, never commanded, but cultivated — through showing up, through practice, through what she calls the basic good manners of being ready when the idea comes.

4.

This is where the book quietly parts ways with the way most of us think about creativity, which is fundamentally as a problem of talent. Either you have it or you don’t. Either the gift was given to you or it wasn’t, and all the effort in the world won’t manufacture what nature withheld.

Gilbert is not interested in talent. She is interested in curiosity.

Talent, she points out, is not something you can do very much about. It is distributed without apparent fairness or logic — it arrives in people who waste it and bypasses people who would have honoured it enormously. But curiosity is available to everyone, at almost any moment, for free. It is the willingness to follow a thread simply because it interests you, without any guarantee that it leads somewhere important or impressive or useful. Without any guarantee, really, of anything at all.

She makes a distinction that is worth turning over slowly. There is a difference, she says, between the person who lives creatively out of curiosity and the person who has made creativity their entire identity — who carries it as a wound, who needs it to justify their existence, who can only create from a place of suffering and urgency and high romantic stakes. The second person is exhausting to be, and not noticeably more productive than the first. The first person follows what interests them because it interests them, makes things because making things is pleasurable, and is genuinely, constitutionally difficult to stop.

5.

There is a point in the book where Gilbert tells her own story, and it is not a triumphant one. She spent years writing in near-obscurity, supporting herself with waitressing and bartending, sending work out and receiving rejections, continuing anyway. Not because she was certain it would eventually work. But because she had made a private agreement with creativity — she would show up, consistently, without demanding anything in return, and see what happened.

What happened, eventually, was Eat Pray Love, which sold ten million copies and made her famous in a way she had not entirely bargained for. But her point is not that persistence guarantees success. Her point is that the years of quiet, unrewarded showing-up were not the price she paid for success. They were, themselves, the life. The creative life she had wanted. And they would have been worth living even if the book had sold three hundred copies and no one had ever heard her name.

This is the idea at the centre of Big Magic, and it is both simple and surprisingly hard to actually believe: that a creative life is not something you earn through suffering or justify through achievement. It is something you choose, repeatedly, in small acts of attention and curiosity and willingness to be a fool. It does not require genius. It does not require an audience. It requires, mostly, that you take your own interest in things seriously enough to follow it somewhere.

Coleridge lost two hundred lines of Kubla Khan to a man from Porlock. He spent the rest of his life mourning them. Gilbert might gently suggest that the man from Porlock was not the tragedy — that the tragedy was believing those specific lines could not be replaced, that the source had a limited supply, that what was lost was lost forever.

The ideas keep moving. The door is always, somewhere, being knocked on.

The question is whether you are at your desk.