I Realized Something About Art: The Truth About Art's Role in Our Lives

A Brief Reflection <3

We all feel the discord of hurt, illness, and therefore, existential loneliness, and the perverse societal perception of loneliness as afflicting only recluses, eccentrics, or the perennially forlorn only compounds and obfuscates our struggles. Nevertheless, we are least hurt, ill, or suffering when we feel and understand that we are not alone and that suffering and loneliness are universally shared existential psycho-philosophical experiences. In ideal scenarios, we can find shared experiences in things like art and philosophy, literature and music, art and poetry and painting -- where other people like us, from inside of them, their complex insides, are also inside us and others. Though challenging to share, art intimates the abstract or forbidden parts of ourselves, the parts and constituents we have not told to each other or necessarily can tell otherwise. Art does not help us reconcile our existential illnesses. However, it does help us reconcile our place in the world and our place in the universe by allowing us to connect over the shared isolation and alienation we all feel and that which we can never surmount. Moreover, there is a bridge between the world and our mind that we will never be able to locate or cross. Art is one of the few places where suffering and illness can be confronted. Inside our one-by-one bag of bones, where no human mind or spirit can fully penetrate, poetry, art, and creativity is where suffering finds countenance, is transfigured, stared down, and treated. And to the extent that is possible, it is where hopelessness and suffering go to die. 

~ alexej