Definition, the act of defining something as one way, not another. You have to believe that definition exists, that whatever you are defining IS what you say. Art is creating something to prove that, to show you Get It. I think the fact I am an Artist, inherited from my Grandmother the flapper, means I just can't get along with people with no definitions. Its popular to pretend at un-bias, to build a life around floating relativism. The little blonde in the center of the above picture is the most gifted of artists in an anime called Honey and Clover. Its not happy, but there is a scene at a zoo where she stares at giraffes and can not longer hold back her creativity, a field of unopened boxes. She has time to open just one of them, and express that box. That is what being an artist is like. Joy, at that expression, loss at everything you can't express because there isn't time. And every discovery leads to a new field of boxes, the prior field lost, probably forever. That is the great burden of being an actual artist. Knowing this loss.
An artist needs to be fully expressive of emotions. While not everyone can express emotions, most people try anyway. We have many means, too. I like that the Greeks believed in the Muses, one for each art or craft, the whispering source of inspiration. I think it interesting that the Gaels believed crafts came from the Leanan Sidhe, a high ranking member of the Winter Court of the Fae, a sort of anthropomorphic personification of dark impulses, creativity, winter madness so appropriate to a people still dealing with glaciers and really bad soil thanks to the cold.
Art has a long history. Cave paintings from 40 thousand years ago exist in the Sahara, and in 15,000 years ago in Southern France, much older in Southern Africa, and Australia. There are cave paintings in China too. We are a species capable of definition, in symbolic logic which helps us simplify and comprehend our world, and how we fit into it. Self awareness rises from this characteristic of our species. Those people who SAY they reject symbolic logic are just liars running from a past they would rather forget, and decisions they've made that did not turn out as well as they hoped.
As a species, every memory is actually symbolic logic, metaphors with facts tacked on, stored long term as protein strands, like hair, inside our brains. This is why it takes so long to remember something. Unwrapping the strands takes actual time which is why remembering something takes time. Those strands associate with the standard metaphors we define our world with, things we've learned through experience. Some metaphors are deeper than others, but that's how long term memory works. This was a recent discovery, if I recall correctly, from 2007, some article. There's a lot of important biochemistry required to make it all work properly, but explains a great deal why damage can prevent it all working right, yet some bits will come through. The very biochemistry of memory means we are ALL LUMPERS. We can't be anything else. Symbolic memory is lumping.
Splitters are obsessives who follow a logical path and sometimes this yields science and discovery. Acts of art are splitting, defining something very specific for the artist to their complete satisfaction. An artist won't stop until they are satisfied. People who are able to be easily satisfied generally do not perform great works of art. Skill makes up some of that difference, but effort is usually proportional to satisfaction. The more effort you put into the creation, the more satisfying the result is, usually. This is why I respect craftsmen. I look at the effort they define their world with, welding tubes into a motorcycle frame, fitting a faucet to work flawlessly for decades, building a stone wall. All these things show our pride, our place in the universe. It's so crucial to recognize. There are so many forms of art and expression and denying this act of definition is one of those warning signs I pay attention to. It's a big part of the reason I became a Libertarian, to be able to see the art around me more clearly. Create something. Validate your life.
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