Mystical source, and transformative power of art
It is the mystical force that was possessing the artist during the creation that is enchanting, and not the rules.
I am sitting on the sofa in my parents' room. Headphones on my ears. Dark windows with rare distant lights twinkling on the horizon. I am twelve years old. I am speechless.
Falling into the abyss of fears, sadness, probably, reminiscents of the emotional baggage of my ancestors, and maybe future lovers. I am unable to process what’s going on with me. I am all in chills, and at the top of my own perceiving capacities — as I am floating down the rivers of sounds, uncried tears, and admiration at what I am hearing.
I am listening to Pink Floyd’s unbreakable “Shine on You Crazy Dimond” for the first time — that’s what going on with me. Not yet knowing who is David Gilmour, I am full-on in love with painful lead guitar lines crisscrossing my world.
I don’t remember if Pink Floyd seemed too complex to me at that time, but its moodiness, electrifying melancholy and unfamiliar depth threw me open into the new microcosm. This was a scary borderline where the emotions that opened up in me had no names and were too intense for that age. However … how would I have discovered that part of me if not for this song?
Amazing how a piece of art can strip-off the veil to the place where we are fully available, and suddenly above ourselves.
Be it music, text, or visual story — real art reveals a search inside of us and is answering to this search at the same time.
But what indeed is REAL art?
“There are two sorts of beauty: one is the result of instinct, the other of study.”
— Paul Gauguin
I was a student of the “Art critics” department for one year, I had to leave for personal reasons. We studied lots of theory and history of art. But in the end, it was all about canons of breaking an art piece into rules.
Undoubtedly, art theory describes lots of natural laws abiding by which any art piece will be perceived as more harmonious and generally impressing. Golden aspect ratio, complimentary vs analogous colors, poetic rhyme schemes, music intervals, and many more. As my intellectual baggage in this field was growing and I was learning how to look at art, my ability to transcend with it was slipping away.
Leonardo Da Vinci never had any academic education in the numerous fields of his creation. He was self-taught in many areas, and although vigorously studied human anatomy (which was a must for an artist of that era), it is not his fluency in the rules of Renaissance that is so mesmerizing in his work.
In one of his journals, he wrote that to make a good painting one should be able to look into peoples’ faces with intuition. Numerous sketches of Mona Lisa’s lips found in his notes reveal how intentional was the sense of haunting ambiguity that we see in her smile. Not a single geometrical rule of art can reach out to us if it doesn't make us emotionally involved.
A successful Parisian businessman, Paul Gauguin became a painter later in life. His body of work was all in service of expressing closeness to elemental forces of cosmos which found its way through vivid colors, and “flat” forms.
My first encounter with this painting tete-a-tete was much later then I got to know Dutch Baroque School and Renaissance, yet I don’t remember anything that impressed me more in the form of painting by that time. Gauguin was never highly rated during his lifetime, he abandoned bohemian life in Paris for simplistic living in Polynesia. A closer look at many of his paintings shows that he was often creating with scarce resources.
Yet the sense of freedom that emanates from his work is staggering for the mind. Was he using the idea of freedom to give breathing to his painting, or the idea of freedom was using him? And using uncompromisingly according to how he suffered from his own choice for freedom which however bordered with vulgarism and moral impurity before he died.
While some use Malevich’s “Black Square” as a generic term for the art nobody understands, others find themselves fully immersed when standing in front of it. Well familiar with the rules of iconography Kazimir Malevich was radically applying the mixture of Christian symbolism and satanic symbolic language in his work. The Christian “all-seeing eye” is mysteriously embedded in many of his art pieces, implying that while we are looking at the painting — the painting is looking back at us.
His “White on White” is an oda to the philosophy of non — doing which he considered being the “wisest” state of being, and the only state when art can be created (“by itself”). Some uninitiated find “White on White” boring and “poorly plotted”, others immediately get in touch with its “code” and catch the zen flow.
Another extraordinary abstract painter Mark Rothko once said: “I am not interested in the relationship of color, or form, or anything else. I am interested in expressing basic human emotions: ecstasy, tragedy, doom …” I saw people crying over these paintings, even though they know nothing about the theory of color (which indeed is superbly embodied in his work).
Literature critics found that Fedor Dostoevsky was frequently using the “doorstep” in many of his novels when localizing his characters at the points of pivotal events. In the Russian language, the word “doorstep” is the same that is the “threshold”. Since being on the brink of reality (and often sanity) is a repeatedly central theme in Dostoevsky’s writing, this led many to believe that Dostoevsky was using it on purpose, (likewise many other symbols very mundane in nature), to put his readers into the trans-like condition by his narrative.
Did Fedor Dostoevsky himself cognize the symbols that he was using? Or the symbols were running him while he was writing?
The above are just very few examples of how we are reading art, and cohere with it. And although we can simplify any masterpiece to the number of theoretical rules, it is the mystical force that was possessing the artist during the creation that is enchanting, and not the rules.
Mystical source of art
Describing his creative process in one of his interviews Tom Waits told a story. Once driving in his car on a freeway he suddenly felt inspiration coming down on him with a new song. He couldn’t even park sideways at that moment so he cried out: “God! Why now! Don’t you see I’m driving? Go somewhere else … Go to Leonard Cohen!”
Many artistically talented people realize their source of inspiration is a grace of higher forces that have chosen them as instruments.
Mystic poet, better known to many as a philosopher, Sri Aurobindo, has an exceptional work on the divine nature of creating (“Letters on Art and Poetry”).
He says that the most genuine poetry, and art, is created when the original source, or inspiration, can be conveyed pure and undiminished, “taking its native form through the speech” (in the case with poetry), or any other mediums, thus exactly reproducing the inspiration.
When the mind is too active and gives its own translation to the vital force, the art remains “still powerful but is inferior in quality and less authentic”. And finally, when the mind and emotions are interfering too much and make their own version out of inspiration, the art becomes “mental manufacture”.
Sri Aurobindo goes into detail describing the variations of how the divine creative force can reveal itself. Talking about poetry, he says that in its purest manifestation the essence, rhythm, words, and forms will all descent into the artist’s consciousness as one unit. But it may also be that the creative force will only send an idea, and rhythm, language, etc. are “formed somewhere in the instrument” (i.e.artist).
He also mentions that not always a creation comes from the higher source, but can be a result of the “mind practiced in a certain artistic technique”.
“There is also the possibility of inspiration not from above, but somewhere from within on the ordinary levels, some inner mind, emotional vital,” — he writes.
But wherever the inspiration comes from, he continues, there is always a joy of creation that the artist is experiencing. He describes it as “intense as fire, but full of sweetness”.
Enough has been said about the healing power of art, but not less eloquent is historical evidence of the connection between exceptional creativity and mental illness. Numerous are biographies of talents who were depressed, suicidal, paranoic, and ended up almost beyond the social border — Van Gogh, Hemingway, Virginia Wolf, Edgar Poe, Fransisco de Goya, Jim Morrison, Vladimir Mayakovsky — the list is inexhaustible. However, if we look attentively enough, we will see no obvious correlation between their sparkling genius and their suicidal inclinations.
Rather individual traits of their personalities, not their artistic bliss, were continuously interfering with the harnessing of their own creative energy, and talent.
Genius filmmaker David Lynch can hardly be known for anything less than meticulous microsurgery on the psyche in the domain of human fears and deviances. Yet, any interview with him, any of his public speeches is an example of true humility and wisdom. Being an advanced meditation practitioner, he is full of sincere love and charm when speaking about creativity.
“A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary, but in reality, any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity. Happiness “in the doing” is so important. I always say it’s our life going by….” — David Lynch.
Just like in mystical tradition mental illness is only a reflection of our personal karmic relations with higher forces — be it Higher Self, God, demons, or ancestor spirits — the same can be true about our creative genius. As a force of a higher origin — it is wild and extremely lively. By no means, it is going to feel measured, polite, or ask for your permission to come in.
It’s not the force, it is our relations with the force that makes us ill or alive.
Art as a gestalt
The father of gestalt therapy Fritz Pearls said that we are perceiving the environment through the “unclosed” parts in ourselves.
In this context, according to him, neurosis is an inability to attach back the alienated pieces of the psyche.
These pieces are reaching out to us through all non — verbal means: body language, our dreams, and — art. Both as we create, and as we perceive it.
Although we can’t help loving to enjoy art aesthetics, it is the art that makes us go down in flames and sends us butterflies that is a real therapy.
Fritz Pearls suggested, “by staying with the discomfort one is able to recognize its purpose”. It is a mechanism of our nature to interrupt ourselves in moments of painful emotions (thus sustaining the neurosis) and hide away from pain. Through art, we are more open to prolonging a moment when we become available to own our entangled states.
The language of art synchronizes us with rhythm when we are breathing fully. As we continue watching a movie, reading a book, looking at a painting, or listening to a piece of music we experience an “exaggeration” of what we are feeling. If we choose not to self-distract, we can gradually recognize the emotions that have not been met.
When we love a piece of art it is because we are reading ourselves through this art.
And in the end, the art is reading us…
