I was raised up believ­ing I was some­how unique
Like a snow­flake unique among snow­flakes
Unique in each way you can see.

And now after some think­ing I’d say I’d rather be
A func­tion­ing cog in some great machinery
Serving some­thing bey­ond me.

 

A high­school friend who went off to the States to study film was explain­ing to me what he called “New Age Cri­ti­cism,” which seems to emphas­ize the viewer’s per­spect­ive to the exclu­sion of all else.

“So I take my friend’s paint­ing,” he says, “and I throw it on the ground. And of course he’s upset, he says, ‘Why’d you do that?’ And I say to him, ‘Did that mean some­thing to you?’”

We had been talk­ing about what makes for art, and it was use­ful for me to see where things broke down. My friend was try­ing to illus­trate to this painter, who appar­ently sub­scribed to this New Age Cri­ti­cism, what it means to dis­count the artist’s inten­tion and per­spect­ive when apprais­ing art. And I saw as well what hap­pens when the rela­tion­ship between the cre­ator and their audi­ence cor­rodes — that art ceases to be.

Defin­i­tions allow us to throw a fence up around some­thing and domest­ic­ate it, and as far as I know art as a thing or object has been elu­sive prey, its sole pur­pose some­times to be the break­ing of any bound­ar­ies put up against it. But con­sider art as an action, or a verb — the com­mu­nic­a­tion between one human soul and another — and I think we can begin to pre­serve its ambi­gu­ity while under­stand­ing it better.

To see, in this case, that a fall­ing tree makes no sound in a forest without ears has helped put my life in per­spect­ive as well. Much of the Buddhism I’ve read talks about the inter­de­pend­ence of everything — you don’t have a fence without the wood that made it up, and the tree that made the wood, and the sun and rain and earth that made the tree, etc. — and which, taken to its end, fun­da­ment­ally con­nects all things; and it’s easier to begin see­ing that than it is to live and under­stand it. But I have wor­ried about my sin­gu­lar role as a human being alive here for maybe 70 years and come up empty; there’s noth­ing I will do that will not even­tu­ally die or be forgotten.

Which is not the point, my friend said. We build so that the oth­ers who come after us may have some­thing them­selves to build upon; that great people are not the product of indi­vidu­al­ism but an exten­sion of the soci­ety and envir­on­ment from which they came. And so I don’t need to worry about myself any longer, but instead can grow into shoulders upon which oth­ers may stand, together reach­ing up into the heavens.