There is a secret that not only enhances the quality of our work but enchants its bearing. A secret that lies beyond widespread productivity hacks. The secret is: aligning with the purpose of our craft. Let us say you wish to be an author, you begin writing, and soon enough, you find it as dull as your output; suddenly, on a strike of genius: you no longer write but paint with words. What caused it? The place you wrote from changed from your ego to your self. In other words, you connected to your work on a deeper level, and the muse smiled at your devotion.
I have been writing daily for a few months now. During this time, my creative energy shifted like the tides. I was too vain to accept that I did not respect the craft in the same way I romanticized it. I read great books during that time and was constantly reminded of the welfare one can find in words. To be a writer, I had to reach that place in my soul where Calliope waits.
I attempted to contemplate art: I wished to understand the source of the bliss I felt from it. I asked myself: “what is the gift of writing?” Shamefully, I did not find an answer, my view was tamed with modern notions of success, and art had no place in them—degraded to financial gains and resource accumulation. I was in torment for some time. Could it be there is nothing more to life? Is life bound to be caged by pleasure and greed? How can I live in such a reality?
They say hope shines from the heart of darkness, as did mine. A new profound way of logic came to my aid. My mistake was thinking of art’s direct influence on life, which forced an answer to the values of life, leaving a shadow of humanity where art’s sole purpose is entertainment and money. Instead, I need to define art from its place in the human experience.
To define art in such a manner, we must first determine the goal of life; like pieces of a puzzle, I needed to see the whole picture to find art’s piece. Of course, I am not arrogant enough to assume I know the goal of life, but for the sake of our undertaking, we can define it as leading a meaningful life.
There are opinions as much as people regarding what is a meaningful life. But it must be detached from external circumstances; otherwise, it is bound to time and space and cannot be universal. We often mistake meaning for happiness, we talk of happiness with the tongue of sin, and we believe that when we reach a certain point where we would have certain things, we will be happy and content—this is the devil’s oldest trick. One can find meaning in pain and heartbreak just as much as in joy and love. Thus a meaningful life stems not from external prospects but from the merit of the soul (see Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich).
Now that we understand that a virtuous soul is a precursor to a meaningful life, we can discover art’s place. By viewing art as a condition for virtue, we dismiss the claim that art is a mere source of entertainment; art’s objective is the intercourse of consciousness between the artist and the consumer and the creation of something new from that. Every work of art creates a timeless space of relations between the producer and all consumers.
Speech, where we use words to transmit our thoughts to others, is aimed at bridging between us and others. Art is similar but is distinguished in that it conveys feelings. The power of art stems from two truths: first, through art, we can experience the feelings of the artist, a simple example of that is the subconscious influence that causes us to yawn when another yawns, or smile when another does; second, at our core, we are feeling creatures, thus all of life shifts with the movement of feelings.
Since feelings are the roots of all, they are also the base of civilization, feelings bring up ideas, and those ideas are communicated to others who join together for that idea, thus creating change. A person has gone through an experience and wishes to share not only his feelings—pain, grief, joy, or love—but the way they changed him. Simply reducing the experience to lessons like “love thy neighbor” is futile since the listener’s beliefs are different and based on his experiences. Art aims to bring up the emotions in the consumer so that the change comes from within. This ability is art’s power and purpose.
Art’s appearance resembles a dream. It represents the abstracts of the soul with sensory data like scenery, impressions, and events. It aims to teach and modify the organs of the soul—which are most readily accessible through feelings. Because of that, one can only receive from a work of art just as much as he can open for it, which explains why the same book over different periods of our lives has a different meaning.
Ideally, art aligns us with god and virtue. It teaches us right from wrong and good from evil. The goal of art is a union between humans, a union based on love and compassion. This alignment is done by extending the consumers’ repertoire of experiences and depth of soul. The world materializes as the total of peoples’ values, and the artist aims to influence those values toward the good, like the parent of a child. The artist seeks to take humanity a step closer to heaven.