Where Art thou?
By Jacob Mills
I met him at a bar in Adelaide. He was an artist. A contemporary dancer, a storyteller through human movement. I was a scientist, a storyteller through observed detail. After a while, he confided in me his belief that relative to my science his art was not meaningful to the world. I’d heard this before, and I’ve heard it since. It troubles me.
I’m troubled that there are those that choose to, through art, enrich our collective consciousness with detailed and vulnerable expression of experience and philosophy, yet see their art as meaningless in the grand scheme. But, what is the grand scheme? To work, sleep, mate, repeat?
Science unwraps layers of unfathomable beauty – the way flowers talk to insects and atoms become entangled across vast spaces – this is undeniable. With science, we can find gravitational waves and the Higgs boson, go to the Moon, save the whales, grow food in a changing climate, cure blind children, create napalm and Wi-Fi, and robots to wipe our arses and AI to raise our children.
But science is not the expression of the human experience – of our divinity. From amateur to artisan, artists create portals. These portals can flash us through the raw emotions of place, of love, of war and peace, of ultra-fantasy. They can show us our capacity to destroy or adore. Art can take us through our egos and show us parts of ourselves that we couldn’t imagine, the parts that science can’t see, nor cares to. It calms us in the night. It gives us the ropes with which we bond to each other around campfires or dining tables, on loungeroom floors, in vast festival ‘scapes and intimate galleries.
~
The morning sunlight came in through the eastern window and draped golden over her. She was sat on the bed with the blanket pulled low around her, legs crossed, covered only by a cherry red guitar. She smiled radiantly and told me that she had a song to play for me. I was already feeling the bliss of young love in the morning and laid back to cherish this moment further.
The lyrics that she carried, ethereal, began to hit me with the most beautiful intention in the rawest of places. Somewhere outside, I could feel the tide begin to come in. This was no experience I’d had before and as her voice began turning me to wax, I half covered my face as I began to cry. I haven’t cried for a long time. And it felt good.
There was deep meaning in that moment and in everything we had been sharing together. And the light, our bodies, and the notes in her voice in that rendition captured so many things for us right then, and we shared it intensely with music.
It was beautiful.
~
Art is the great expresser, and without expression the world becomes petrified and white. Ash and chalk that blows away with the wind, with no intention or capacity to sit in the moment. When we are drained of our colours the world will be too bleak for us to survive as humans. We will become ill, then robotic.
The enrichment of our communities and the waves of our resonance come through sharing ourselves, giving each other our experiences and learnings, growing together and feeling inspired by each other. And to die having become the fabric of the collective human experience. To die and live forever through entropy and empathy, through quantum entanglement and vulnerability. We can do this, with art.