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Reaching into the invisible and giving it a name.
Emotions become colours, sentences, shapes and sounds,
And suddenly, what lived only inside you can live in another.
Take poetry, for instance.
“I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear my trousers, rolled up.”
My darling, that is bathos.
A literary device I learnt recently,
and somehow, learning its name made me love art even more.
In science, we spend our time trying to explain what is.
Very often, art asks a different question; what if we simply felt it?
It can make you experience a heartbreak you have never had,
taste a grief you have never known,
or hold a fear as tangible as the palm of your hand.
That is the strange beauty of the arts.
They do not always explain the human experience.
Sometimes, they simply make you feel it.
You can explain bathos, of course.
You can define poetry, dissect a painting, analyse a story,
name every technique and every stroke.
But art was never meant to be understood alone, it was meant to be lived.
To be taken to the mountaintop by a sentence,
then dropped, quite suddenly, into the ridiculous.
To laugh when you expected to cry.
To ache when you expected to be fine.
To stare at a blank page and somehow find a world waiting there.
That, my darling, is creativity.
The beautiful, bewildering ability
to turn nothing into something,
and somehow make someone else feel it.
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