Meaning things

The Truth of Beauty; The Beauty of Truth

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
-John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

I have never been the kind of person that could be satisfied with superficiality. I could never look at simple painting of fruit and stop myself from giving it a disdainful glance and deciding: ‘Well that’s not art.”
Yet I can still look at it and realize that it is incredibly beautiful and that is a talented hand that has reproduced the still life as this image. And yes, the lush purple oil-paint shine of that plum probably might make me kind of hungry.
I cannot deny that I love beautiful images like most normal people, and I too can spend hours lost in the flowers of spring or laying unconscious on the ground after walking into a lamppost for stupidly staring at a beautiful person on the street, transfixed by the feeling of aesthetic pleasure.

Yet I have always searched for more in life, in the world, in people, than that which is beautiful on the surface, and I have always tasked myself, in my ideas, in my work, to grasp more. Like many others, I have spent my life searching for, and striving to create meaning. We all want to mean something, in this big world. We all want our lives to have meant something in the multitudes of the infinite lives that have and will exist around us. We want to mean something to the people around us, we are all seeking to connect, to find our place, and yet carve out our individual foothold within that – whether it is by the masterpieces we try to create or those that we procreate, whether it is by finding our other half, or finding the rest of ourselves amongst the rest, of carving our role in the home or in history, or leaving behind a legacy or family heirloom, our search is for meaning, for fulfillment, and part of this is the ability to connect in some wayt; to relate and to compare. I believe that perhaps in some way, even if we do not realize it, we all search for our own kind of meaning.

While it may be the bankers’ job to stop the world from going bankrupt (bankers you are failing), and the parents’ job to raise their monsters, and the governments’ job to tax us for all we are worth, as someone who dares call myself an artist, I believe that we have an important role in the world too, one which is too vast and full of debate to pinpoint – I cannot speak for every singer or writer or painter or crazy performance artist making a scene on the street. But I can speak for myself. And it is in this recent affirmation that I realized what it is I, personally, as an individual, am looking to find in the world, in the people around me, and what I as an artist, have been, without even knowing it striving to create for so long. I feel in a way, as if I have put words, and therefore understood better, that restless urge inside me that courses through my blood like a driving force and burns in my head like an idea,
that elusive thing which I have always subconsciously felt was my purpose.
I am on a quest for meaning.

So I introduce myself, and I introduce my topic – a topic which it took enough time for me to realize is not just the topic of my dissertation, but has actually been the very fuel of all I have ever tried to do and has shaped the looking glass for all I have ever tried to find in this world. It is at the core of me, and all that I have tried to create.

Perhaps it is why I abhor the idea of simplicity. By simplicity I am not referring to the fact that my brain and everything it unleashes on the world is imbued with a hectic pattern of overwhelming chaos – that is more to do with my personality.
By simplicity I mean the depthless lack of tone, dimension, and detail to an idea. For me, yes it is true that everything must be complicated. Because I cannot have it any other way, I cannot be part of something that means very little, if not nothing to me, and to those who will experience it.

I yearn to create other worlds and distant places, images that have sounds and move, characters that have a name and a story, even if know one but me will know it, rooms that taste and smell and feel and say something too. I live to create experiences that engage and transport and transform, that stimulate the senses, and yet they must mean something – they must mean alot, one must be able to connect, to read into it and sink their minds into its infinite depths while dipping their toes in the beautiful shallows, I want to tickle memories and also create them, to incense the sense and provoke the mind, to charge every thread with feeling and thought. Experiences that mean something, and that will not be forgotten in a hurry when they return to their lives – instead that they may take a fragment of it with them and let it inspire them, or teach them, or make them smile and cry.