Discovering the universe within ourselves.
Image available in the Public Domain
Let’s start with journaling. Your mind is buzzing. You perceive an acute sense of inexact emotion, hard to place exactly, but unmistakably present. You feel something. So, you open your notes app and let words flow. The first sentence comes out. You read it over. It carries a semblance of meaning, but doesn’t totally capture how you’re feeling. You type another sentence, unveiling slightly more meaning. And again. Just a bit further, a pinprick more exact. And again. It is if you are converging, slowly but surely, on an aphorism unique to you.
What’s really going on here?
The way I see it, you are undertaking the role of an artist. When you opened your notes app, the unknown lingered, confined to potential energy in every click of the keyboard. It was a blank page. You slowly began to articulate the unknown into a word. A word has a precise contextual meaning, but one meaning isn’t complicated enough to explain a complete feeling. You need a specific arrangement of several words so that their meanings come together to approximate what you are feeling. Yet, the inherent fear of expression emerges: that the exact articulation you are reaching for might materialize. But is that not what art is? An approximation of that mysterious feeling of what it’s like to exist?
Da Vinci remarked that “where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.” Therein lies the significance of art: it doesn’t come from empirical reality. If art was a replication of reality, the word “creativity” would not be associated with art. To “create” is to spontaneously bring about something that wasn’t already part of our reality. So what is the root of this spontaneous creation? Well, I would equate it to asking where our free will springs from. The short answer? We cannot, as wordly humans, possibly know. So if it’s not something we can possibly know, it’s worth asking: what if everytime we exercise this free will, this ability to create, we are actually harnessing an intangible power beyond the metaphysical barrier?
Henri Matisse, a keen observer himself, said that creativity takes courage. When you create, you are exercising that which is unknown within yourself. Each time you create, you’re taking a chance on finding that unknown. Whether it’s a canvas, a page, or a dance floor, there is only one combination of choices that will ultimately emerge. After you hit one note on a piano, you are forced to contextualize the sound by making another sound. Hopefully by the time you have two or three sounds, things start to sound “right”. But who even knows what “right” means? So much uncertainty! And what if the combination you arrange isn’t what you envisioned? It’s intimidating to create! The freedom is what enables you to discover something great, but having freedom also means there’s an infinitesimally small chance you create the spark that your soul is satisfied with. That’s why so many artists seem obsessed: they toil away night and day, grasping at air, trying to catch the exact cadence of their souls.
Thus, considering the daunting nature of creativity, I implore you to take the works of all authors, musicians, painters, dancers, and architects quite seriously. Not just the ones you are inclined to, for when you engage with a creative work, you are being privileged with the experience of a physical representation of what one has expressed as their deepest, most inarticulated demons and angels. They couldn’t explain it to you any other way, so they did it this way—they made art. And if you do feel something inarticulable while experiencing their chorus, then both you and the artist have been placed into the same transcendent realm. For that moment, the two of you exist in the same place, yet in a place beyond yourselves. And that is a beautiful thing.
I’ll close with a personal anecdote. I am a fiction writer. I’ve taken a creative writing class every semester since coming to UF, and I have to say, it has been the only class I’ve truly looked forward to every single week. Creative writing workshops are fully unadulterated environments; if you ever get the chance to take one, I hope it brings you as much human insight and childlike vitality as it has brought me. Anyway, I was going through a classic early adult nihilistic-phase last spring, and I had a story due for my class. I started writing and created this seventeen year-old Brooklynite named Jeri, who was flippant, deep-feeling, deep-thinking, and completely repulsed by the follies of adulting. “Never in my life have I seen a happy person with a job,” Jeri laments. “Everyone seems so motivated to reach the very thing that’s going to bore them to death. Like moths drying out in the light. Who even tells the moths that light is good for them?” As I continued to write this character, a word kept popping into my head that I knew would end up being integral to the story thematically. The word was “responsibility.” At the time, I gave no thought to its true significance. There was no personal epiphany; things were still as dull as ever in my life. I just knew that channeling that word was the right way to counterbalance Jeri’s character, and would ultimately be the note the story would have to end on.
Now, if you’ve read anything about the existentialists, you’d know that the antidote to nihilism is to accept responsibility. I hadn’t known that explicitly. I was just writing, expressing from my innermost sensibilities. As it turned out, that summer, I became Jeri, my character. What he realized about responsibility, I came to realize as well. The answers were right there, hidden in the fibers of a story I had created! To this day, I carry the profundity of that overlap in all that I do, instilling in me a sense of great humility. My experience taught me that whatever the troubles, somewhere out there in the world, the answers already exist. The symbology of the universe is already incarnate within us. Does that then mean that all we have to do is become conscious of it?
If yes, then that is what art is for. To translate what lies beyond into our reality, to endeavor to make the unknown tangible. So—I depart with a message from the creative mind of author Kurt Vonnegut: “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. Seriously!” It is both beautiful and frightening to know that whatever’s beyond you might also be within you. The decision is yours—do you have the courage to open that notes app and start unearthing?
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