Living Art
Posted 3/28/2011 by Amy Kristen in Labels: amy kristen, art, bach, literature, love, monet, music, yeats
Yeats, Monet, Bach… In the daily turmoil of our lives, we often forget about art. We don’t read as much as we think we should, we don’t watch all the films we’ve been recommended, and a trip to a museum is a once-a-year (if that) kind of occasion. We’ve shoved art aside; it has lost its importance. Or so we think.
What we seem to frequently forget, however, is that the very act of living itself is made up of artistic masterpieces, one by one, colliding into each other. Human relationships are art, and the most exquisite of these is the one single connection that has managed to evade capture by our feeble words, hands, and minds: love.
Love has been pursued by the most capable of hunters, and as a result we have libraries, museums, and iTunes playlists full of homages to the one ethereal higher power we all seem to be capable of worshipping. We have tried to capture love by giving it a name (the insufficient “love/amor/愛/etc.”), turning it into a symbol (the “heart,” which is really just a variation on a circle, indicating love’s endlessness), and rallying behind it as a mantra (all you need is love). But love is a fickle beast; it manages to skitter away right when even the most capable of human thinkers and creators believe they have cornered it.
To put it simply, love is a masterful combination of ineffable emotions and chemicals. It’s the driving force of humanity, the reason we work, the reason we dream, the reason we breathe. We each long to catch a glimpse of the deity Love at least once in our short lives, even if it may only be through a muddled reflection in a broken mirror. Though incomplete, that one shimmer of the Divine, as philosophers of yore might attempt to label it, will be enough. Love, and the simple knowledge that it exists, is enough to sustain us through our journeys through the dark valleys, because we are confident in its ability to supply the nirvana that occurs when we finally reach the summit, even if we are not meant to linger there for long.
The greatest pieces of art are not, then, comprised of our insufficient mortal imitations, but rather the source of our inspiration itself: love. Love is the most effective and yet the simplest form of communication we have yet devised. Love, in its many infinite and equally meaningful forms, can exist anywhere two people are together, sharing a moment in the swirling current of time, as they each acknowledge the pulsing beat of life radiating from within the other and know, without a doubt, that they are not alone. We live to love, which is to say we live to appreciate the life in others and have our own reality similarly validated. Every piece of “art” that stems from this force is really just a microscopic piece of a cosmic puzzle that all humans across the ages have been trying to put together. Our art attempts to capture the essence of the only real art in our reality, the great and powerful crazy-little-thing called Love.
--Amy Kristen
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