Mentalechoes

It struck me at 2.30am on Saturday morning while I was drunk and shouting over the top of very loud industrial music to a girl at the Korsakoff bar somewhere in Amsterdam central, what it is that artists do.

If you imagine that life is an orange, and you squeeze it with all your strength, all of the stuff that comes out and dribbles over your fingers and falls to the floor, that’s the essence, this is the stuff artists capture without losing any of the colour, feeling and smell. They capture the essence of life, and they distill it into a form that we can absorb.

Well I guess you probably knew that already, but I really liked the analogy I came up with using the orange.

I tend to think that this talent for feeling and seeing the essence of life is not something everyone can do. It’s not something that comes naturally just from simply being alive. Just like you don’t automatically become wise just because you make it to 60 years old. The essence of life is only found through heavy soul searching and pain. That’s why artists have to suffer; it’s only through the process of sacrifice and the ritual of pain that their minds are sufficiently enlightened to see through to the mysterious center of our mortal existence.

Something I saw on TV recently really had me thinking about all this. About a week or so ago I managed to catch the start the movie, Frida about the mexican artist Frida Kahlo who was made a walking cripple in a bus accident when she was only 18 years old. The beautiful and powerful images - not necessarily at the same time - that she went on to compose throughout her life were montages of her deep feelings and experiences rooted in her suffering. Undoubtedly the woman was possessed of a very high degree of ability concerning the technical aspects of painting, but would she have been able to create the same intensely emotional art if she had not had the accident and suffered such terrible injuries? Well Frida is just one example, history is littered with the names of great artists who lived very intense lives that the mainstream simply could not, or did not want to experience in the same way.

The essence of life then seems to be something that reveals itself only to a very few who are willing to look for it. Like I said, I don’t think that just by point of fact that you are alive means you know something about the essence of living. So many people will go a whole lifetime and not come close to squeezing the orange so that the essence will pour over their hands making them sticky and pungent, and deliciously dirty.

It reminds me of something Hunter S. Thompson wrote at the beginning of Fear of Loathing in Las Vegas; He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. It makes more sense to me now. It’s not just about the freedom that comes from liberating yourself from society through totally antisocial behaviour, but also about being able to see into the heart of life and to see the essence that flows through it with every beat. After all, once you’re not part of the mainstream anymore, you can finally step back and see what it is the mainstream really is, which gives you a perspective for what you really are. Mind you, I guess that works the other way as well, as people from the mainstream who look at you will see something that will give them perspective on their life in turn.

This is why art is so important; it awakens the sleeper inside of us!

Padwanna!