On Confinement and Creativity

 

On Confinement and Creativity

 

----- Sabuj Sarkar^**

 

Confinement by force is troublesome, but confinement by choice is liberty. It may apparently surprise someone but the more one goes deep into it, the veracity of the statement becomes translucent. When you choose confinement for your own sake, you just make the best of it. You open up all the hidden doors of your psyche which remained so long bankrupt only because you didn’t have the luxury of free thinking. If the job you do is not out of passion but for pecuniary purposes; it actually kills your spirit in the name of salary.

The history of confinement is never new. Two thousand years ago Xihan dynasty of China inaugurated the postpartum confinement in the name of “zuo yuezi” or “sitting out the month” ¹. Confinement in the name of imprisonment could be seen in the ancient Mesopotamia.  The code of Ur-Nammu in ancient Mesopotamia records, “If a man commits kidnapping, he is to be imprisoned and pay 15 shekels of silver.” The codes of Hammurabi ² were in no way less innovative.  But it was a fact proven down the ages that confinement in the name of punishment cannot heal an individual, neither can it be benefitted for the state. Confinement in the name of punishment leads one to religion and spirituality even. And the biggest example in this regard is a stone tablet of 723 AD of Tang Dynasty in China in which Buddhist temples were close to the prison houses to rehabilitate the prisoners for a better life and understanding ameliorating past misdeeds. In the history of human civilization, men of wisdom had often been the victims of solitary confinement as they were nothing but threats to the society. In Plato’s Crito, Crito’s suggestion³ to Socrates was to escape from prison and a moderate amount of money could settle the dispute. The Mamertine Prison of Italy diarizes how confinement meant for waiting of an approaching death in ancient legal system of Rome.

Confinement has its own turquoise colour with a soothing effect. It is the personality of an individual that makes confinement vibrant. Confinement sans threat of death makes one feel that life is not linear rather multifaceted. It puts one in introspection and helps to dive in surprising himself with some lovely gems that he was possessing so long without knowing. Confinement without punishment is a joy; a self discovery. It is an opportunity for those dreams, those hidden talents that he hardly could think over only for the lack of time. “fugit inreparabile tempus⁴”, so said the venerable Virgil, means “it escapes, irretrievable time” . Confinement comes with a makeover, a complete sea change honing the skills often unnoticed.

Confinement by choice upholds creativity as the murky sky often yields a fresh shower and in both cases it is helpful to resuscitate the mind. For creative minds isolation is an elixir. The train of ideas can keep a mind busy with thoughts but is hardly effective to reach its desired goals. Journey can conceptualize a thought, confinement engineers it. For it was no other than Blake to remind us, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence⁵.” Proper utilization of a conditioned confinement can be best found in Boccaccio’s Decameron during the plague in 14^th century Florence.  So was Shakespeare in the early 17^th century, very productive, during the spread of bubonic plague in England and wrote King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra when London was locked down and the theatre houses were closed. It is said, Isaac Newton during his quarantined period in late 17^th century was so creative to think afresh the theory of gravity when the country was hit by another threat of bubonic plague and as a student of Cambridge University he needed not to attend the classes. Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flue is one of such evidences that encapsulates the mood of the ailing painter Edvard Munch with thin hair and a pale face and he continued to paint more on this theme during and after his recovery from the Spanish flue.    

Confinement by choice is the gift of God, a self imposed journey towards success. Paul Gauguin’s secluded life in the island Tahiti is an artist’s devotion to his art. Milton’s agenda to lock him in for years after his studies in Cambridge is a preparatory ground for a larger leap. Confinement is concentration. Getting accessible to everyone and for everything is distraction. Arthur Miller’s magnum opus Death of a Salesman is the result of a self imposed confinement. That is true also in the writing career of Earnest Hemingway. The Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has a similar philosophy of life. He simply locks himself up even from his family members and goes on writing novels. Every creation is a magic. It demands a sound mind and a systematic organized life style. A creative mind in distractions is far away from his creations.

Covid-19, a pandemic in 2020, put the whole world in threat. While killing millions across the globe and leaving the rest in quarantine and in social distance, Covid-19 became phenomenal raising certain issues of human existence on earth. Life before and during Covid-19 was remarkably different from one to the other. The maddening liberty of roaming everywhere stopped suddenly. People became deranged. They started to adapt themselves in this new scenario, but the rate of impatience grew up gradually. It became more and more prominent that human being is impatient by nature. And to minimize this impatience, they can do anything. They can dance until their leg ache begins. They can cook food until all the members in the family are overburdened with a protruded belly. They can write poems lines after lines and posting them on the Facebook and social media when no one is left with any more power to go through them on the screens.

 

If we put these jokes apart, Covid-19 was, for a section of the society, a boon in banishment. It is true, lovers could not meet face to face for months, but they wrote beautiful poems for one another that they hardly could do before while enjoying snacks in an evening restaurant. When parks were no more available to the kids, they took shelters in the cartoons on the screen, and when they didn’t find anything new in them, they started recitations, dancing on the roof and receiving accolades from the neighbouring roofs, making origami and clay models and reading fairy tales with siblings. Couples who were maintaining troubled relationships suddenly discovered a new meaning in co-existence repairing all the tattered corners that led them to the courts for a settlement. Husband found the long unused dusty violin in the attic and played a fine tune that he desired so long to manage. The wife found their sepia coloured pre-marriage photograph in the corner of a drawer and hummed a song and turning over the pages of a recent recipe while searching the long forgotten lyrics in her hypothalamus. Earth becomes greener. Butterfly came back suddenly in the drawing room and then it came in a kaleidoscope. The sky is suddenly in a new life, not only attired in the cadet blue but also dressed in aquamarine, cerulean, denim and also in Prussian blue. The whole earth is in creativity. 

 

There is always a comfort in confinement.

 

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Notes:

1. Ancient Chinese tradition started the practise of “zuo yuezi” or “sitting out the month” which means after giving the birth of a baby, a mother has to be in a compulsory traditional treatment to bring back health and fortune. In that thirty-day session of “zuo yuezi”, the mother would take a special food particularly prepared for confinement, she wouldn’t be allowed to go out rather she would wrap her body with layered dresses, even in hot summer, later avoiding any contact of water, no shower and not even brushing her teeth.

2. One of the Codes of Hammurabi goes like this: “If anyone has a claim for corn or money upon another and imprisons him; if the prisoner dies in prison a natural death, the case shall go no further. If the prisoner dies in prison from blows or maltreatment the master of the prisoner shall convict the merchant before the judge. If he was a free-born man, the son of the merchant shall be put to death; if it was a slave, he shall pay one-third of a mina of gold, and all that the master of the prisoner gave he shall forfeit.”

3.  “Actually it’s quite a moderate sum that certain people want for rescuing you from here and getting you out of the country. And then surely you realize how cheap these informers are to buy off, we wouldn’t need much money to settle them.”

4. Virgil. Book 3 of Georgics. Line 284.

5. Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

 

 

** [ Sabuj Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at  the University of Gour Banga, Malda, West Bengal, India. He could be reached at: sabuj.ugb@gmail.com]