Grief Is Power- Essays

CHAOS: THE BIRTH OF ART

I believe that most people that are involved with the creation of art are somewhat intrusive. The fundamental idea behind creating is perhaps trying to resolve some sort of problem that manages to surround life due to various circumstances and the ramifications of our past decisions.

In such moments art becomes a way of communicating with the world outside and somewhat finding a conclusion for the inside world that manages to clash with each other, like clouds. And these fleeting moments cause thunderstorms that manage to have lasting impacts on lives. Through the despair that transforms from such chaos, artists choose to write or talk about it, where creating becomes a way of understanding the meaning through it all. Because it is the meaning of everything that becomes an unawareness and the need to get through this chaos.

Art has historically managed to prevail in these moments because life itself is chaotic in nature– there is nothing that is settled and resolved that flows in a very miraculous pattern that churns out our needs like a shelf of utensils. Art on the other hand is the reflection of oneself, and hence, the inner turmoil manages to slip itself into the real world.

Like a steel rod that is used to attract lightning, art manages to attract such grievances. It becomes a conductor of such emotions for the role of art forever has been stillness. At the eye of it all, art manages to not succumb to the widening, kaleidoscopic and collective hurt that people inflict and feel. The power of art is to manage to hold still these chaotic moments into fragments and process them in order to find not peace, but the meaning of its creation.

If I look for the greatest artists, especially through the literary dialect, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, and even Oscar Wilde, their works manage to part take and resolve by crawling in the midst of turmoils that surround the choices of their characters' lives. Sylvia Plath throughout her body of work, especially in poems encompasses the feeling of emptiness and emotional draught:

White: it is the complexion of the mind.

Though not a Shakespearean at heart, Shakespeare resides in the air of literature– a pantheon-like creature that is inevitable. As a young child, I remember reading The Tempest, perhaps my only favorite piece by this Lord of Literature and I remember falling in love with the very aspect of love, loss and ultimate revenge that plagued the very air the characters breathed. Very few works of literature manage to knock the air out of readers. I remember reading this text, on a wet July in India, on a hill station as a young 15-year-old boy, with gray skies and water drumming down the building and mud slapping around the area. I sat there, in the classroom, while the teacher tried to explain, I read, ignoring, tempted yet drowned. Yet, all the romantic prowess in the story could not manage to drown the vengeful thoughts of deep magic that lay in the island and its residents.

Perhaps, among all, the greatest artist, and the one whose life itself was a source of turmoil, was the great Oscar Wilde. Living at a time when being himself made him an unlawful human being in Great Britain, his stories chronicled the closeted inner lives of his characters that often lived in a chaotic world where both personal and public turmoil fell by the sidewalks of the vast, ghastly collective despair that plagued their social and public lives.

Wilde's characters were driven by romanticism, some of them much more hopeful than the others, some bothered and unbothered by how the chaotic environment around them would never let them completely embrace their true selves. In such lives, coping becomes the source of despair: not knowing if tomorrow one falls in love, would they survive to love again? That even though they understood who they were, was it enough? It is one thing to accept oneself, it is another to accept the world.

When something as big as the world happens, chaos is bound to ensue. Peace never comes like a fishing eagle, it comes to swoop at the moment, like a mild, velvety breeze of the fresh morning air. And passes just as quickie as it arrives.

Perhaps this is why artists like Oscar Wilde remain one of the most read and admired literary icons in the world: not just the boundary of his sexuality defining that success, but it was about who he was. His life and art prove that if amongst all the angst, one dares to look deep within oneself and face their darkest moments, and secrets in life, there is a sparkle of such fierce power. And that power only manages to churn out from overwhelming grief of something that is either lost to the world or in the world.

And perhaps in these terms, love, like a drug, is much more dangerous than we can imagine.