The Value of the Creative World
It all begins with an idea.
Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. They have a life to live, and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, and they don’t love you anymore. All of a sudden, you’re desperate to make sense out of this life. “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?”. Or the inverse- something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight! “Did anybody ever feel like this before? What is happening to me?”. And that, is when art is not a luxury.
It is sustenance.
- Ethan Hawke.
For as long as I can remember I have been an admirer of art and the creative world. It has long been, up until very recently, a wildly mistaken assumption of mine that all people are. Since realising this wrong, I have been on a sort of subconscious undertaking to understand my longing for art and why it is so dear to me. A hero of mine, Nick Cave, talks about himself as a visual artist in the sense that he “sees the world” in contrast to his musical peers who seem to “hear the world”. I consider myself to fall under the latter of these factions and I think it comes from the fact that I am inherently musical and in turn, artistic. Being raised by very musical parents fostered a world that was never short of song and one that was incessantly soundtracked. As a result, whenever I find myself reflecting on my life, I draw parallels between time and songs. I often attributed this to a deep sense of nostalgia but as I have grown older, I have come to realise that the real reason is something much more profound in that within me is a connection to music of such depth and concentration that it has become synonymous with my very identity. The role it has and continues to play in my life is one of all natures, from stimulant to sedative, and those seemingly insignificant songs or albums of various times and moments have ultimately and concurrently with time, amounted to a life of my own.
When considering my opinion on the value of art and creativity, I find myself drawn to the simple yet crucial question of “why?”. Why do I veer from a nihilistic position of “well, it doesn’t matter. So why ask the question”? Why do I care? In truth I feel it reductive and dismissive to not consider this question and fundamentally I am nothing if not a man of enquiry. Of all my mundane qualities, one I take particular pride in is my ability to find pleasure in detail. The moment a song gives you goosebumps or a film makes you cry. When a novel brings you so much joy that you reach for its sequel before finishing its final page. Above all of these moments of value I relish one perhaps more than any other; the moment inspiration strikes. I am surely not alone in this, but the moment I hear, read or see something that draws from me a deeply seeded idea or yearning to create, I feel immensely empowered and, more importantly, able. Creativity instils in me an often fleeting but formidable purpose and honestly, if my life eventuates to an unyielding search for these moments of inspiration, it will be one of gratified satisfaction. Sometimes I feel all we are as humans are creatures of rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. Clear moments are fleeting and ephemeral in my young life but in them, I am whole. A rare constant in my life has been the recurring conclusion that creativity and art render me whole, time after time. It is sustenance for my soul, when my intellect, body and emotions seem to be absolutely one. Art gives me energy, joy and moments of pure bliss that I never grow tired of and is a constant source of harmony among the dissonance of life.
I suppose all of this is a roundabout way of saying I love art. It absorbs in it everything I love and disperses a purity and an ecstasy I fail to uncover elsewhere. For this reason, I find myself in pursuit of this purity and ecstasy and imagine I will remain there for the rest of this life and undoubtedly, the next.