Poemander

Bad is that painter who cannot reveal the colours yet unseeing; bad is that musician who cannot produce a note so intimate, that it resonates underneath the skin.

Parented by boredom and desperation, any creative art is an act of aggression. It is an urge, it is a killing, it is nothing but disturbance to the profound silence of existence. Giving birth to an art piece is akin giving birth to a living being; the moment something is born – it is destined to die, in the process of dying from the first second in existence. And this process of dying we call life. Therefore, to create something is to force it from the world of unmanifested ideas, violently, into the world of beingness. Creation is derogatory; it is a process of degeneration, the process of coercing the omnipotence and omnipresence of the universe through the narrow funnel of will, condensing aether into clay.

Leonardo da Vinci famously declared that he is at fault before the mankind for his work not reaching the quality it should have. If so, then what about all our little dealings we call art? And I don't think that it was da Vinci's perfectionism. It was his realisation that creation is at best the ugly sister of Uncreated. Look at modern art – this is violence and decadence, but who's at fault? No one, it is just a growing realization of our own uselessness. A mid-age crisis. Anyone?

But let me be done with this rant, let me accept that we'll do what we do anyways, always, despite the collateral damage. So what is art to us, beings striving for self-realisation, approval, a kind of self-worth if I may?

Art is the manifestation of will. The transformation of impressions as they define the reality of perception. An artist is someone who has his/her own perception capable of shifting between the impressions.

To humans, there are four primary forms of art: music, dance, visual arts and poetry. Other arts are either practical crafts or are the combinations/extensions of these four. Each art is tied to a corresponding sense: dance to smell, music to sight, visual arts to hearing and poetry to touch. Taste is an inferior sense in humans and is loosely tied to creative writing, which is not really art by all means, as it involves different cognitive mechanisms incomparable to the four primary arts. Writing requires a thought process, or a process of infiltration by the mind which is harmful to the point of rendering arts being unauthentic. Four primary arts are most authentic when unhindered by the mind.

Dance is the most primitive and the most powerful; it relies on sense of smell which is itself the first and the most ancient. Mind has almost no control over the sense of smell and thus leaves it wild and untamed, so is the dance.

Music is the form, it is the biggest of them all as it represents the structure of the cosmos. Music relies on sight because the musician must be able to “see” the forms and translate them into sound. Note, that the concept of senses is used here in a cognitive context rather then physical faculty. Therefore, the world has known great musicians who were deprived of the physical faculty of sight, nevertheless, their cognitive processes related to sight still remained supreme or even exceeded those of the sighted.

Visual arts is a “frozen” music; therefore, a painter has a “sensitive ear” and is inspired by music. Again, a painter may be deaf, but the cognitive processes related to hearing are dominant.

A poet is the one who stands in both worlds, he/she is capable of touching the unknown and translating it into words. The touch is the most “bodily” sense, it brings you into this world, but the poet cannot settle in either world: has to always travel across the bridge, which is his/her talent and well as a curse.

The true skill of artist is at avoiding the traps of concepts. There is no shortage of ideas. Once fallen into them, artist becomes a craftsman at best or otherwise just a charlatan. In its purest form, art, has no utility and this gives it the authenticity. The delivery is more important than the idea. Idea or concept turns art into staple. Craft has utility and thus requires an idea, this makes the whole difference; art can only be related to an idea but not created by it.