Patience, Perseverance, and the Written Word

Do you know the story behind Samuel Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan?

Coleridge had a dream (possibly while smoking opium) that inspired the poem, and began to write madly as soon as he awakened. He finished 50 lines before he was interrupted—and he never went back to it again. It remains unfinished. Gorgeous, mind you, but unfinished.

               In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

                Down to a sunless sea.

I wanted to write about patience here, but realized that for creators—writers, visual artists, musicians—patience and perseverance go hand in hand. You can’t persevere without patience, and your patience enables you to persevere.

But how do you develop patience? We all have a tendency to want to just get it done, whatever our “it” might be. One of the things we’ve all probably noticed since the advent of Covid-19 is the frenetic pace we’ve all been keeping, the push to work more, work harder, work faster. The pandemic has allowed many of us to stop and look around and take stock of what we’re doing—and how we’re doing it.

A decade or so ago, I was awarded a writing fellowship by a consortium of nonprofts that administers the Margo-Gelb dune shack in Provincetown: two uninterrupted weeks perched on a dune above the Atlantic Ocean, with no electricity and no running water—just time. Time, and a manual typewriter I’d bought off eBay.

I produced a book, or the substantial beginning of a book, while I was out there; but perhaps more importantly, I learned about patience. Because you can’t rush a typewriter. All you can do with a typewriter is move forward, keep writing, keep (literally) pounding the keys; and it takes the time it takes.

I’ve tried to bring that sensibility into what I do now, even though I’m using a MacBook instead of a typewriter and I can multi-task to my modern heart’s content (I checked my email twice and looked up Kubla Khan, just while writing this essay). How do I bring the patience a typewriter requires together with the perseverance that finishing a project requires when so many other things vye for my energy and attention?

I think here the key is to keep trying. Keep failing, keep making mistakes, keep getting up again, and forgiving yourself for the failures, having patience with your own slowness and lack of motivation. Finishing the poem, the painting, the song.

Starting another.

***

If you’re interested in the Coleridge story, here’s what he has to say about it, annoyingly speaking of himself in the third person:

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage : "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things , with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!