Art: An act of defiance against nature.

A struggle to give rise to unnatural things. "Unnatural" as in things that weren't there before, were not created by nature, so man saw it fit to set out and create them himself. Fickle things that beg for a definition, and yet elude any tangible terms, right from the moment they are born.

It is ingrained into our existence, and yet it cannot be inherent to human nature. It is something far beyond that.

Think about all the things we enjoy. The taste of something sweet. The affectionate touch of a loved one. The comforting warmth of a fire's glow in the night. Thousands of years of evolution have taught us to enjoy this, and our instincts still obey.

But there is no meaning in the brushstrokes of the old masters, beyond that which we attribute to it. There is no purpose to the pointilistic sceneries of Seurat, no rules to quantify if something makes Boticelli's Venus more or less beautiful than Klimt's Lady in Gold, and no map could ever chart the surreal worlds born from the minds of Dalí or Escher. When we look at Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, how is it that we are compelled to feel something different, something deeper than when any girl with a pearl earring were to look back at us?

There is no rational reason for us to enjoy the melancholic sounds the piano in Debussy's Claire de Lune, nor the angry grinding of guitars and bass in Old World Industrial, or the lamenting and screeching electronics of contemporary pop music. And yet we do. Not all of us, of course, which just makes it all the more fascinating.

Art has no purpose but simply to exist. No purpose but to please, be it the eye of the beholder or the ear of the listener, or to offend, to rouse and excite, to lift us up and cast us down. It is a decadent, lavish and utterly incomprehensible form of expression of our innermost. It is born whenever the brightest lights of that otherworld of our imagination fall onto the darkest corners of our mind. It is the grandest thing that humans are capable of.

It comes in so many forms. Written. Drawn. Tangible. Imagined. Spelt out or silent. Quiet or Loud. Colorful or black-and-white. But my favorite form by far is song.

The beauty of music lies in its sheer endless possibility to carry meaning. Words and pictures, they already have a meaning, a defined quality to them that can – no matter how creatively or beautifully used and put together – never be shaken off.

Look at the picture of a mountain, it will be a mountain to you as much as to the next person. Look at an artist's brush stroke with purple color, the color is purple, it will always be. The interpretation of an image may vary, based on association, but the experience, the qualia of the visual, is unchanged.

But a song carries infinite meaning, infinite possibilities, infinite worlds that lie just behind the veil of imagination, and these worlds can be different for everyone. I can even listen to the same song twice, thrice, a hundred times, and still I may experience it differently, discover a new aspect of it every time. A new image will appear before my minds' eye, or a new feeling will be roused within my heart.

The songs become doors for me – doors into another world, full of infinite possibilities that belong to me alone.

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A.N.
I wish there was a better version of this song on youtube. Give it a listen on Spotify if you get the chance! It's Vanessa Mae's version of Vivaldi's "Storm".