Chasing the Truth, by All Means. Part 2..

For the artist, the goal of the painting or musical composition is not to convey literal truth, but an aspect  of a universal truth that if successful, will continue to move and to touch people even as contexts, societies, and cultures change.

Daniel J. Levitan, THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC, p5.

..............................................

Thank you, Mr. Levitan! There are problems with the current perception of "truth" in our culture, including the denial of objective truth, as if something can be true to you and not true to me. Really.

Sorry, but I'm an absolutist: there is absolute right, and absolute wrong. Yes, there are shades of gray, but I believe that much gray is merely a slope that tilts toward either black or white, good or evil, truth or a lie. Sorry, pop culture--you're out of step with history--it's not me being a troglodyte, it's you being a libertine!

"Truth" is not determined by polls, public opinion, talking heads, or, let's break it to them gently, not by celebs or politicos! (gasp!)

=--==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-

Okay, enough, David! Really, these people can read that bad news in the paper or half a dozen other sources for the nabobs of negativism.

I started this column intending to address creativity once again. I don't tire of flogging this topic, because creativity seems to have retained one lousy publicity agent. I have been thinking about this topic since I did a paper on it in college. There, I mostly focused on divergent rather than convergent thinking, and probably didn't address the arts at all!

So, poetry and prose, painting and (com-)posing, sculpting and styling, all are attempts to reassemble preexistent truths into new compilations, combinations, and compost. (Compost--why? Because, to try, to learn, to achieve anything new means that there's gonna be a lot of false starts, flops, and outright failures. Remember that famous line attributed to Thomas Edison as he cast about for a light-bulb filament that wouldn't burn out almost instantly: "Yes, I have tried over 10,000 different materials that have failed--but that means that I'm 10,000 steps closer to the one that will work!")

I try to write a poem a day. Some are merely rhymes that really have minimal artistic flavor or insight, they're simply silly, or are sarcastic swipes at pop culture--but there's the occasional one where I sit back and say, "Bam--that kicked it up a notch!" I wouldn't get that result without taking a run at a poem a day--kinda like practicing the piano or a foreign language...ah, but, is poetry a foreign language, or is it our God-given language and we are alienated from poetry?

And, by poetry, I don't mean my little rhyming couplets--I mean deep and beautiful words and images and sounds that swirl about your heart and make you feel like you are seated in the middle of a symphony and a thunderstorm and a rock concert and a Thanksgiving feast!

Read anything like that lately?