Bridging the worlds of art and reality

I want to address this post to a short conversation I had with my friend over dinner. I've always been a proponent of the idea that leaving a paper to write the day before it is due is not a big deal, so long as you spend time thinking about what to write in advance, since the actual writing part is merely execution and it is the crafting of ideas that takes time. She responded that this method would work so much better if what came out on the page was anything close to as good as how it was in her head--in essence, that the execution is just as, if not more difficult than the creation.

I responded by pointing that dichotomy--of the world of art, stuck forever in the artist's brain, and the world of reality, never matching the perfection that is the world of art--that dichotomy and the inevitable isolation of these two worlds is one of the defining natures of art and the artist. Indeed, this impossible pursuit of perfection may even lead to greater beauty, as we consider how the artist resolves the difficulties that the real world brings. Either way, this impossibility, this knowledge as the artist that our works will never truly equal their greatness in our mind's parallel artistic world, is part of what makes artists so tragic.

In essence, I found a way to change the conversation topic from "well, I can't actually write like you say, on the day before, because I can't execute" to "well that's what makes art beautiful and tragic". Like the political science major I am, I didn't answer her concern at all, and instead talked beautifully about a very related topic and suddenly we're having a discussion of art and the artist instead of how hard our upcoming humanities paper is, without anyone noticing. Indeed, that's perhaps the most notable thing: that I didn't even notice myself! I'm only writing about it now because it came across my mind in retrospect. For those of you who have asked me how I direct conversation (you know who you are), feel free to take note.

But that's not the main topic of my post today. Instead, I want to add to, and slightly change my approach to the relationship between execution and creation in art.

As I look back, my friend was right: given that we cannot ever truly capture what is in our minds to what is on our papers, my policy of last minute execution and constant focus on creation probably isn't best. Instead, what makes a great paper and great work of art is not only the deliberate attempt to realize the impossible bridge between the two worlds of art, but also, and perhaps more importantly, directly tied to how this process of realization continues to inspire and alter our creative tendencies.

See, if our only goal is to take the work of art that exists in our minds and graft that into the real world, we are doomed to fail. This is what I was thinking when I discussed the inherently tragic nature of artists over dinner. This, also, isn't the best way to go about making art. Instead of trying to graft one world onto another, we should be trying to meet somewhere in the middle--and crucially, we should be taking in, learning, and getting inspired in new ways in our attempts to do so.

The isolation of the artist's mental world and the physical world around him isn't what makes art tragic; rather, it's what makes it so inspiring and powerful. For in our attempts to replicate in the physical world what we see in our mental ones should not result in a frustration over the inability to create a perfect replica but rather should result in new inspirations as we realize what we are capable of doing in the physical world. For, just as it's true that in our mental worlds we are unbounded by the rules of reality, so it's true that in the physical world, we have access to an ability that we'll never fully have in the mental world: the ability to try things out and experiment, to see how they work.

And so now, while building upon the seed of the idea that we crafted in our unbounded yet firmly theoretical mental worlds, we can experiment with different options and methods in the physical world--experimentation that inevitably will inspire us further, perhaps change our ideas in our mental worlds, but certainly develop into a piece of art wholly different from what we originally thought of in our minds: wholly different, and just as, if not more beautiful.

Addendum:
Indeed, I actually wrote essays (and do my art) in this fashion too; I just didn't articulate it as such in the conversation, and really didn't realize it until I started thinking about it explicitly. When I'm writing a paper, an essay, even this post, I just have a very general idea, and then new ideas about specifics and such come to me as I see and process the words in the document I have just written. Entire paragraphs of my writing sometimes appear simply on a whim based on my reactions to what I have previously written; the section about directing conversation in this very post, for one, was not planned at all.

On a micro level, this effect is even stronger: I certainly don't plan out sentences, let alone any sort of structure besides a most general idea of what I want to write about, yet my essays end up structured fine and the sentences flow to my satisfaction. I think this is because it is only natural for us to continue developing our ideas and marry the creation and execution processes; truly, this ability to create on the fly is what makes art wonderful. It also makes it rather difficult for me to do any heavy editing or to add in any new thoughts that I have at the end after I read over what I write. Given that this post is for myself and not for a grade or anything, I was lazy about it and just put these added thoughts into this addendum rather than trying to retroactively work them in.