image by AI; not my prompt
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
— TS Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets
Science journals often speculate on why art, in all its forms, seems a uniquely human invention. The assertions that H. neanderthalensis was at least “capable” of producing cave art seems based more on ideological conviction than on actual evidence. Surely, if we are the crown of creation, then ‘lesser’ creatures must be pretenders to that throne.
But the leading experts on anthropology suggest that while our neanderthal cousins were accomplished at crafting and using practical tools towards specific practical ends, it is doubtful that they created art. And attempts to ascribe artistic creation to “intelligent” species like chimps and ravens are mostly, I think, wishful thinking. These creatures are excellent mimics, but copying does not require knowledge of what you are doing, or a motivation to do it beyond a human-proffered reward.
The prevailing wisdom on non-human art would seem to be that while many other animals have the brain capacity to invent and produce art, they never did so because they have no need to do so.
So the question is: Why do humans feel an irresistible need to produce art?
One obvious guess is that, since all our behaviour is biologically or culturally conditioned, there must be an evolutionary reason why we condition each other to create art. What might that evolutionary reason be? Perhaps because producing art makes us happy, and happy people tend to procreate more than unhappy people? Seems rather lame reasoning, since there are a lot of unhappy artists out there. In fact I’d speculate that artists, on average, are less happy than non-creatives.
A more tantalizing reason might be that the unique construction and commensurate evolution of human brains might have made us uniquely imaginative, and hence able to conceive of things that don’t actually exist, and also to conceive of ways to ‘represent’ them as if they actually did exist.
Why might we want to do that? Why aren’t we happy with everything just as it is? Why do humans all seem to endlessly want more, better, improved? My hypothesis would be that it is because as long as we can imagine new, ‘better’ things, and imagine things being ‘better’ than they are, we are likely to obsess and fixate on that ‘better’ ideal, and become hopelessly and perpetually dissatisfied with things as they are. Especially if that obsession is constantly conditioned in us by other humans in a self-reinforcing loop. Perhaps our art is an attempt to placate our unhappiness by making something ‘better’ than what we think currently exists as ‘real’.
But, you might say, not all art is beautiful. Some of it seems designed to stimulate our imaginations to conceive of something horrible — horror movies and dystopias, and some art depicting war and other terrors for example. I would say that such art serves two related functions — it serves as a warning that while things aren’t perfect they could be worse, and it serves to entertain, distract and divert us by presenting something interesting. And both of those functions are still about representing what is ‘better’ vs worse, and what is interesting vs uninteresting, another form of ‘better’. Anything but ordinary. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
Art, in other words, might be all about what could be if it was viewed from a particular perspective (the artist’s, which she might or might not care to share with an audience). It is not about ‘what is’. Even photography (especially with today’s ‘perfecting’ technologies) is not about ‘what is’. It is about what we might imagine and represent as even better.
What is ‘art’ anyway? Art is the reproduction of something we perceive or conceive (or can conceive) as real. Why would we want to reproduce something that already is? To reinforce our memory, perhaps. Why would we want to produce something that isn’t real? To help us imagine it as real, and hence, hopefully, achievable (or in some cases avoidable).
So we have three main ‘reasons’ why our species might uniquely create art:
- to help us remember ‘better’ [in more detail, and not necessarily as it really happened]
- to help us ‘see’ something ‘better’ [through different ‘eyes’]
- to help us imagine, and hence perhaps strive for, something ‘better’ or avoid something ‘worse’ [‘better’ = happier, more secure, more pleasurable, less painful, more interesting, less hopeless]
None of this is about seeing what really is, here, now. I would argue that this is because with our entangled and bewildered brains, overwriting our perceptions with conception and ‘meaning’, we humans are incapable of seeing what really is, here, now. As JA Baker said about his studies of hawks, “The hardest thing of all [for the human animal] is to see what is really there… It will not be meshed in words”.
So I would posit that our art is an intuitive recognition that we cannot ‘see’ the world as it really is, and a form of consolation — that, at least, we can conceive of what is not. We can conceive of what might be. Including ‘things that are not’ that are perhaps ‘better’ than the reality we can no longer see.
I had a conversation last year with Tim Cliss, a friend who one day suddenly ‘lost’ his sense of self and separation, and suddenly, without that veil, could ‘see’ what ‘obviously’ just is. He said he no longer has any interest in creating anything. Why would he want to, he said, when ‘what is’ is obviously the only thing that can possibly be. “There are no possibilities”, he said. “There is just this”. Nothing ‘better’. The memories, the different ‘meanings’, the possible futures — all stories, made up, of no value.
Except, perhaps, to placate us, to make us feel ‘better’ about what we have lost — the capacity to see “what is really there”.
My creative writing and music is incredibly important to me. It is an essential part of who I ‘am’. I am bereft without it. I save multiple backup copies of it. Why? Because it transports me. It takes me outside of the prison of my ‘self’. I ‘become’ less ‘me’ and disappear into the words, the characters, the happenings, the rhythm, the harmonies, the voices.
This is, I suppose, a form of escapism. But in a way, perhaps, it is the opposite. This ‘me’ that has been carefully constructed over a lifetime by others and by this frenetic sense-making brain, is, the artist in me seems to be trying to say, desperately worth escaping. Art is my escape, not from, but to.
Maybe that’s really all art is. An expression of our passionate, inextinguishable desire to escape from the fantastic and untrue story of our lifelong imprisonment, back to what all other creatures in the world can obviously see: Just this, this everything, just as it is.
