Happiness has never inspired great art for me. Beauty comes from pain. These sentiments have echoed through time, reaffirming ideals of tortured artists and starving play-writes, reveling in their enforced suffering. Sometimes I think these sentiments may hold true. Art has always been a cathartic process for me, allowing me to give my pain a physical shape, smearing it, messy, across a blank page, giving it life, freeing it from where it was trapped within me. I am happy now, happier than I ever have been, and I cannot seem to get my creativity flowing. There is nothing to animate, nothing to give wing so that it may leave my heart and set me free in the process. I guard what lives in my heart now greedily, not wanting to let the glow of love escape it. The beauty exists in the love itself, beauty for beauty’s sake, warm, shimmering, fresh, like the tingle of salty sea spray blown up from the waves across your cheeks. I crave it. A true artist should be able to create beauty out of happiness as well as pain.
Plato said Love was an old, ugly, cruel thing. Love, he argued, wanted Beauty and Truth, Sincerity and Youth, but one cannot want what one already has, and so Love must lack all of these things. Love, for his wanting, is ugly, dishonest, insincere, and foul. Try as I might, I cannot find error in his logic (and who am I to question Plato?), but having known True Love for the first time, the kind of love songs and plays are written about, the kind of love they make movies about, I cannot see anything ugly about it. There is no dishonesty in our love, no insincerity, nothing cold, painful or dark. I find myself disagreeing with Plato on a fundamental level, an emotional, irrational one. I have committed the Cardinal Sin of Philosophy: I scorn logic in favor of an appeal to subjective emotion. How can what exists between us be cruel, petty or childish? Perhaps it has the capability of becoming so, but every relationship has 3 players who guide the course of things, the two lovers and Love itself. In the past I have hesitated to personify Love, but now I find myself drawn to the idea. We don’t choose our Love, Love chooses us.
August 10, 2011