While I was jogging today I was listening to a song with a piano intro, and I remembered something from an old Simpsons episode. Lisa is listening to a violinist play, and a man complains about the music; Lisa replies, "you have to listen to the notes she's not playing." I noticed that the song was more beautiful because I found myself filling in notes in my head that were missing in the playing: the remaining notes in a chord, or resolving a line with the key the song is written in. Knowing more about music now and being able to pick out patterns, I could hear notes that weren't there, and the song was that much better for hinting at the notes and letting you fill in the rest. Just like that line in the episode I saw many years ago. It stuck with me because I never understood it. Until now.
Art works the same way. Drawings are just concepts of reality. An artist uses a line, or a shade, or a color, to imply something real, and to evoke thought and feeling. Graphite on paper is suddenly so much more. Yet the artist uses only lines and shades, colors and shapes. The viewer sees something more by taking what is implied and filling in the rest with their mind.
Why is something even more beautiful when it's incomplete, when the details are implied but not stated, when we are urged to fill in the rest? I liken this concept to the first moments of falling in love. You know just enough about the other person to intrigue you. You see their outline; the rest is still a mystery. And yet, you fill in the gaps in your head, and what you fill in is perfection; because what you imagine will always be what you wish to see. The person becomes more than what they are, and the result is beautiful: defined in truth, refined in imagination.
Art, music, love, science, life... when the walls separating these come down, we transcend.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
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Art and music are inexorably connected together. It is passion that adjoins art and music together in a common bond. Sure, it is a human intangible that conjures emotion but it is the pursuit of that emotion that expands on such things as music, art and other parts of expression since words can never completely say what we want them to.
ReplyDeleteSo I attempt to draw, I strum guitar strings, I play piano, I look towards constellations, I question life and write about everything learned even if learned by failing. All I know now is what I wanted to know then but that time has far passed so I have to be secure with the past and every single choice I’ve made.
Life can’t be maintained by the high or the very definition of low, similar to depression and extreme happiness there has to be a counter-weight for both just to maintain balance. Molecules in their excited state can’t escape the grasp of love or the pheromones and the dopamine love produces. The quiet abandon that love incurs disarms, making one vulnerable and ever ready to collapse.
There is no certainty about the facets of a person especially in time. My saying is that transition is not a position. The X and Y-axis can’t even plot such a path for a person who is always changing but people always are.
It’s strange, I’m not good when it comes to difficult math or aspects of science but it’s both that have taught me mostly about life. Music is math and a body or mind can’t be explained without first taking into consideration atoms.
Two hundred pages left in Chainfire. I’m going to re-read Phantom. After that, Confessor will be my last journey. Take care.
Word association thought about you when hearing these lyrics due to that poem you wrote toom any years ago. I'm surprised I remebered. Key word: jester. “In the days of Kings and Queens I was a jester, treat me like a god, no they treat me like a leper.”- Atmosphere