Letter from the Editor

Sooner or later, anybody who creates or makes something — artists, musicians, writers or craftspersons — gets asked a version of the question: “How long did that take?” One could talk about inspiration and flow of ideas, but another perspective considers the tension towards irresolution that exists in any piece of work — given the infinite number of shapes it could have taken, why that form? How does one sort through all possibilities to reach an end? How do you know when to stop? In other words, what is the relationship between the creator and the piece of work?

Adrian Stokes (1965) understood creativity as “an ability to disregard an order elsewhere obtained, to ignore an itch for finality in favor of a harder-won integration” (p. 112). This might explain why some artists continue to rework pieces even after they think they've finished them. Favoring the act of creating over finishing means that the piece continues mirroring the imaginative process, both fluid and evanescent, that conceived it. The unfinished object is an alive form, as susceptible to the effects of time and development and change as is the maker.

Finishing a piece, on the other hand, freezes it in time, disconnecting it from the mind that made it. There is a tension when created objects remain the same, even as the eyes of the maker do and don't. And, this tension represents a moment when something about how we exist in the world is revealed. Even though we “know” about the transience of internal states, we also “believe” in psychic permanence — for instance, that identity is anchored to a bedrock of fixed memories and experiences. It seems more likely, given what we know about the mutability of memory, that we create, through imagination, an idea of internal continuity and permanence. Permanence as an abstraction, a psychic anchor, created by imagination to protect us from knowing that the world can be largely inexplicable, random, and coincidental. Perhaps the current fashion of taking pictures o