The phenomenology of making involves a peculiar relationship to time. In ordinary time — clock time, scheduled time, the time in which the rest of life is organized — the session has a beginning and an end, a duration that can be measured. In the time of making, these boundaries become permeable. A session that was intended to last one hour can feel, on its completion, like it lasted twenty minutes or like it lasted all day.
I lean toward the time-of-making as the more accurate account. Clock time is useful for coordination and scheduling. But the time of making — in which an hour of full attention feels like a different kind of duration than an hour of distracted activity — seems to be measuring something real about the quality of the engagement. The Paleolithic painters spent hours underground reaching the chambers in which they worked. The travel itself may have been part of the practice — a progressive deepening of the condition of attention that the making required. The cave as transition, as preparation. The mark arrived at only after the maker had left ordinary time behind.