We like to think our time -- our “free time” -- is our own, and in some sense it is. But more often than not this kind of time does not come from us but is “given” to us through subtraction -- once our commitments to parents, children, teachers, students, employers and employees, to name a few, are fulfilled. Our commitment to -- and participation in -- our familial and economic relationships orders what remains of our time. What happens in the space between is what we call “ours” -- our “free time”.
The notion that free time is given to us contradicts the belief that we, as human beings, are free to choose how we live our lives, and by extension are responsible for what befalls us. This view, popularized at various points since the Renaissance, continues in the form of the libertarian U.S. president Trump, while a contrary view is held by those who, through Indigenous knowledge systems, economic theories of inter-dependency, or more recent tendencies in contemporary art, take a more relational approach, where the focus is less on the self-serving, autonomous or rude individual than on collective intersectional participation in communities that share in and celebrate difference.
Regardless of one’s philosophical orientation, “free time” has become a non-denominational shorthand colloquialism used to denote that which exists outside the realm of our irreducible responsibilities -- the necessity of food, clothing and shelter. Apart from a need for recuperative “me time”, I most often hear the words “free time” used by younger or emerging writers, alone or in collaborative partnerships, when complaining how they can’t find large enough blocks of time to develop their ideas, let alone execute them in the form of a poetry collection, a novel or a play; that the demands of 21stcentury life do not allow them this kind of time.
In light of this complaint, I have begun preparations for a workshop that I hope might address some of the conditions by which our slivers of “free time” are managed and how these slivers might be put to use. I say “slivers” here to address an emergent condition characterized by what Byung-Chul Han refers to as an “achievement-oriented” culture prone to constant multi-tasking and micro-managing, a behaviour that has contributed to the erosion of these longed for blocks of time. It is this shift in the way we experience time that will engender an art and literature whose form is reflective of this condition.
Shortly before his death in 1990, the American musician and composer Leonard Bernstein was asked what he thought of digital recordings and the compact disc. His immediate response was that he “missed the room,” that the digital process does not capture room sounds (specifically, the great music halls and ballrooms he was so familiar with) but responds directly to signals from the instrument and/or voice. But rather than dwell on this loss, rather than lament recordings where the music “just hangs there,” Bernstein said he was excited by the potential of digital recordings to inspire a new kind of music, a music composed with that roomlessness in mind. I am hoping we might inspire something similar through the Writing in the Time You’ve Been Given workshop.
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