I spent my childhood in places that do not exist, or rather, lost in thought in worlds my imagination would make up. Such imagination served as the foundation for my love of landscape paintings, and invigorated my nostalgia for the video game Skyrim and appreciation for the poems of my namesake, T.S. Eliot.
Everybody has pieces of artwork they love. It is definitely the case for me, and I expect for many others, that both what I enjoy and dislike say something important about the person I am.
For example, my unwavering love for science fiction epics like Dune and Red Rising are built directly upon my love of world building and my grand ambitions as a person and a storyteller. Being a storytelling person, too, makes me downright adore Kendrick Lamar‘s Gloria, a song about his complicated relationship with his own artistry.
What you love helps you establish and understand who you are. There is certainty in art. When the world falls apart and when other people fall short, art is reliable.
Such certainty and structure explain how and why we explore history through narratives. While it’s funny to think of our textbooks as art, they most definitely are: we created narratives and imposed them on the past to draw out themes and lessons.
But those narratives are nothing to scoff at. They are not lies we tell ourselves just to be more comfortable in a dark and nasty world; instead, they are glasses that clarify the beauty of the human experience and truths.
One of these truths is simple: as long as we’ve been around, humanity has needed to create art to endure.
This isn’t true of every piece of art, of course. Duchamp’s Fountain likely never relieved someone of their despair.
But whether it’s the echoes of World War I in The Lord of the Rings or the experience of a black teenager in Compton as articulated in good kid, M. a. a. d. City, our experience of tragedies and the emotions which we feel permeate all we try to create and all we use to understand our own lives.
All humans die, but those who decide to write or paint or sculpt what they know and feel continue to live beyond their immediate physical presence. It’s like they added their empathy into a communal chili pot that anyone can dip a ladle into whenever they need to.
Staring at an ancient Roman statue may not solve your problems, since art’s answer to the hard stuff in our life isn’t transactional. Instead, art locks us arm-in-arm with all the humans who endured and did so loudly as to remind us that we’re not alone and we never have been.
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Contact Eliot Cox via email: eliot.cox@pepperdine.edu
