Consciousness and Art

Art is nothing with you and everything without you. You, yourself, are the time and the space that can be expressed as art and it is the experiencing of your time and of your space that provides the impetus for this expression. Without that impetus, all you have are squiggles and pompous words. Those that are impressed by the squiggles (and squigglers) are not artists (nor are the squigglers). There is a reason why the works of Van Gogh and Monet are considered masterpieces and a blob of paint on a canvas is just a blob of paint on a canvas.

This may have a tinge of elitism to it but the reality is that not everyone has artistic talent. And this despite anyone being able to experience the source of art. I imagine that those who experience this source but lack the talent to express it live out their lives with a little ‘something’ about them. You wouldn’t know that these people were life’s artists… There are many good people in the world. One doesn’t need to be a master artist. In fact, many master artists were, and are, horrible people. This is a reminder that genius has its price and being normal may be the most creative thing that a person can accomplish.

Consciousness is a tricky thing. It doesn’t want to stop, but then of course, what living thing does? Is consciousness a safety mechanism? A survival mechanism? I’m not inclined to think so, after all, cockroaches have done well for a lot longer than humans have and their consciousness, to the extent that they have one, is not something to get excited over. Consciousness is like any life – it tries to stay alive in anyway it knows how yet the greatest artists seem to create by bypassing it.

The interesting thing about consciousness is that at some point, a person has to make a conscious decision to remove it from the creative equation. This is what they mean by ‘letting go of the self’. It is hard, very hard. It is not pleasant either. Nobody wants to feel alone and isolated so imagine the courage (or the stupidity) it takes to strike out on ones so-called own. What a desperate gamble! And the further on your own you travel, the more you realise that you have to travel ALL THE WAY to make it through to the other side. You can’t go back. It doesn’t work that way. You have to keep going, you have to change, you have to survive.

You are on your own, and that is just the way it is.