Let the paint dry (Part II)
Link to part 1:
https://ravishu-punia.medium.com/let-the-paint-dry-part-i-3db7ef48703
# Time and space
An artist can only come to appreciate their art and that of others when they value time and space. For what is art if not the manipulation of time and space. For what is art if not the decoration of time and space
A song that pays no respect to time is noise and not melody; a jarring auditory mashup. An incessant cacophony. A song that does not appreciate time always seems to be in a hurry to get somewhere but never really goes anywhere. Like a teenager going out for a city drive.
A song is not made of only sound but also silence. The two come together to birth sound. Melody is empty without rhythm. Music, after all, is the decoration of time. Time is pregnant with the latent possibilities of music.
A painting that does not recognize space becomes all shape and colors. An ungodly amalgamation of lines and hues. A dissonant visual. The empty blue defines a sky as much as the white and grey of cotton clouds.
It is space along with the colors and the shapes that harbor the potential for a painting. It is space, empty and filled, which comes to create a drawing. A painting is the decoration of space.
Life, and even death, has no meaning in the absence of space and time. Even the Gods of creation and destruction are slaves to time. Everything derives meaning from space and time. Without time and space, there is no existence. Everything becomes nothing when deprived of space and time.
# What’s in a destination anyway?
Come to respect space-time and one question will pester you relentlessly. It will keep at you like a housefly that buzzes about your ears and plays tag with every inch of your skin while you flail your hands about like a real-life tube man.
The question of, “What’s in a destination anyway?” Why this hurry to reach the destination; why the yearning for the product. Answer the question and drop the longing and one of two things happen.
You will either give up on the journey or you will come to enjoy the ride. You will either drop the activity or become obsessed with the process. You will no longer seek to complete your art. No artist wants to reach the end of their artistic journey, in the same way, no addict ever really wants to satisfy their addiction. Both want to keep chasing the high.
Ask any writer who finishes their book or essay; ask any coder who is done writing a script or any painter who lays the finishing strokes on his canvas. The journey is far more interesting than the destination. Artists are nomads. For them, the journey is life, the destination is death.
# Channeling
It is the restlessness within that does not let the paint dry. The answer is not to uproot it though, the solution is to channel it. Patience is not the absence of that restlessness, it is its mastery. The idea is to feast on storms rather than being devoured by them.
It is this inner turmoil that impels you to create, form, move, and ideate. Contrary to what you might feel, your inner tension is what keeps you from collapsing in on yourself. That internal conflict is the source of all human action and expression.
You create to resolve that inner twitch but deep down you do not seek its resolution. An addict gets wasted to settle himself but once inebriated, he does not know what to make of himself. Once you bring to life a piece of art, you have no idea what to do with yourself.
# Instability
It is your inherent, inner instability that defines you. Life emerges from chaos and sustains itself by gorging on the same. Anything that is in complete harmony with itself can never be alive. Everything living needs to be in a constant state of strife.
Stability breeds stagnancy. Puddles of water putrefy, running rivers purify. Flow like the rivers but remember that movement and action, by their very nature, are unstable.
The universe is alive because it is in a state of entropy; dancing away from order to disorder. A perfectly stable universe can never birth itself much less all of existence. It needs instability, it requires a state of flux. It is, not despite, but because of it.
Monks who find balance can no longer “human”. They still engage with the world but can no longer be off it. They do not desire to create, to make, to seek, and procreate. They are but they are not. They transcend the self. They assistants the ego. Absolute balance is the harbinger of death.
That impatience, that inner angst, and the disturbance are what compel you to pick up that brush and paint in the first place but it is the same disturbance that makes it difficult for you to let the paint dry.
