Wednesday 26 March 2008

When is there truth in the cliché of art reflecting life reflecting art? I don’t find that Life reflects Art except when it is at its most brilliant or grotesque.

Art is the transcendent communication of essential, intangible human truths. Real Life is a sideshow by comparison to one note of a beautiful symphony, or one word of the most heartfelt poem. Nietzche wanted us all to be artists of life by embracing our own elemental passions and power. Indeed it is in those rare moments of immediacy and fluid energy; whether I experience them as sexual, intellectual or spiritual, that I live, rather than just existing. Wherever I go, and whatever I do I work to create or promote that same energy. Sometimes it happens, more often than not, fleetingly or not at all. The definitive factor is that when it comes, it feels nothing like work at all. Philosophically is this because it is when we are most natural? If one pictures the Universe as a single unity, a continuum of energy so unfathomably vast that all of our consciousnesses are just elements of its whole, then can we consider a new paradigm of fulfilment beyond achievement. The reason that all of the hard work and material accumulation in the world can’t make us happy is because those models of behaviour and reward mistake peripheral accoutrements of being as being itself, rather than hollow, trivial options in artificial games. They can amuse and distract but never make one whole. This is probably all sounding dangerously religious. I see all of those structures as hollow in precisely the same fashion. They provide some people happiness some of the time whilst giving countless others the tools to ensure their own disappointment and suffering.

The one thing I perceive to always give the ‘individual’ that sense of presence to and place within the universe is paradoxically the expression of ‘self’ that is true Art is only defined in the experience of the creator or beholder (often the same person). That is why I love music and that is why I want to write.

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