Arte y originalidad

 

Arte y originalidad

"No nos bañamos dos veces en el mismo río", decía Demócrito, famosa máxima o dicho que podemos contrastar con el igualmente conocido "nihil sub sole novum" de los romanos, que mencionábamos en nuestra anterior nota del pasado 28 de julio. Entre lo histórico, lo coyuntural, por un lado, y lo eterno, lo imperecedero, por otro, está la encrucijada en la que se halla en todo momento el ser humano como expresión o síntesis concreta, transitoria, de esa energía atemporal. O como decía Machado: "Todo pasa y todo queda, pero lo nuestro es pasar."

¿En qué consiste pues la originalidad a la luz de estas consideraciones?

La originalidad – es decir, una nueva manera de ver las cosas, una nueva manera de expresarlas, una expansión del campo de la belleza – es una manifestación, una característica esencial de la energía artística auténtica. Por eso tantos artistas y aprendices de artista la persiguen y desean conseguir a todo precio.

Grave error. La originalidad es un efecto, no una causa de la energía artística. Buscar la originalidad sin desarrollar o disponer de esa energía es como buscar la caricia de una mujer sin haber conseguido antes que nos quiera. O como buscar el amor fuera de nosotros sin haber conseguido antes un mínimo equilibrio psicológico o espiritual interno. O, por recurrir a otro dicho común, es poner el carro delante de los caballos.

Un artista siempre es original, pero un original no siempre es artista.

Cuando nos preguntamos acerca de la génesis de la originalidad en el arte, se nos presenta una confluencia de diversos factores estrechamente vinculados entre sí: surgir de una nueva idiosincrasia única e inconfundible; coyuntura histórica caracterizada por la revolución o la transformación social profunda; desarrollo y disponibilidad de nuevas técnicas; circunstancias psicológicas favorables (por ejemplo, ausencia de formas de represión o autorrepresión extremadas o, al menos, incompatibles con la creatividad), etc.

Elena

He sat there listening to Ljubco, trying to smile at his weak witticisms, acutely aware of Elena's presence only a metre or so away, catching a glimpse of her now and then as Ljubco shifted in his seat or she leaned forward. And for a while, although he felt that bittersweet despair growing inside him, things remained more or less stable on the surface and he thought he was coping quite well. Then, suddenly, she did something – a simple but unexpected gesture – which overcame all his defences, and instinctively he raised his hand towards his eyes as if to protect them from the glare of the sun, but his hand stopped halfway.  The fact is that then and there, he could have grabbed Elena’s face and covered it with kisses. He could have dropped to his knees and spoken the tenderest words to her. The voices of the demons, muffled until then, had reached him loud and clear. There was a demon urging him to bury his head in her lap. There were other demons inside him that, given half a chance, would have compelled him to jump up and down or to start dancing about the garden, yelling, laughing, beating his chest like a gorilla or loudly praising creation like a shaman faced with a portent of nature.  He felt the urge to do all these things but did none of them, of course. Instead, he finally brought his hand up, cleared his throat, and made some trivial remark to Ljubco. He sat there for another quarter of an hour, kept Ljubco going with an occasional question so as to avoid having to say much himself. He sat there, his heart filled with the joy, the terror, of his love for her.

  

The Souls of Those You Love

During those first few months he’d told himself that people are their souls and a soul cannot be taken from you. The soul of someone you love is forever with you and grows with you. It is not something fossilised and static but you can actually talk with people who are not physically there and they actually reply and react to situations. They laugh and cry with you and can talk to you reassuringly and even praise you or scold you. Or forgive you. He now knew that this is very true, but there is also pain in remembering and it is not always easy or possible to remember, and even when you can remember, it is not enough and you cannot talk with those who are not actually there with you as if they were there, physically present. It is a recipe for madness. But tonight it wasn’t like that. For he no longer spoke to her or tried to conjure up her presence beside him. He uttered no words, not even in his mind, but just felt her like something softly glowing within himself, something tenderly aglow inside himself.

© Copyright 2004 Allan Riger-Brown

First Glimpse of Blue

It was always a joy to come in, to pass the headland and see the house in the distance. She loved that stretch of coast and she loved the house. Some other places made her feel she was on the fringes of the world and there were places that made her feel she was in the middle of nowhere, and places – like this one – that made her feel she was at the centre of the universe. In great cities she had felt in the middle of nowhere but she reckoned that if she ever went to the North Pole or Tierra del Fuego she would at least feel she was somewhere. Of course whether or not you like a place depends on so many things – what it looks like and its atmosphere and the people and so on – but in her case she believed there was something more besides: some atavistic need or instinct, something to do with her sense of orientation perhaps – her position in relation to the Earth's magnetic field or something of the sort – or perhaps some unconscious memory of the past, of a place once known and loved, and then forgotten. At any rate she liked it where she was now and knew how lucky she was to be there. She had loved the place ever since the first day when, arriving by coach from inland, she had seen the pine forest and suddenly she was in under the trees, and even in the coach it was cooler and the scent of the pines came in through the windows and mingled with the smell of the exhaust fumes. When you got off the coach, it was a ten-minute walk through the pine forest with the sea-breeze blowing in gentle puffs through the trees and then came the first glimpse of deep blue and then you came out onto the beach. Turning to the right you saw the house ahead, about half a mile away and just in the right place, not too close to the water, not too far, not on the centreline of the bay but slightly to one side, on a spot which probably marked the golden section of the arc of the bay.
She loved to walk up to the house, to its weathered timbers painted light blue and white on the outside – and up the five front steps and into the interior, which always smelled faintly of sea and sun and pitch, like an old wooden boat. It sounded like a boat, too, creaking in the wind, its deck-like floor booming underfoot and, like a boat, the house had its foibles and weaknesses in the shape of numerous draughts, leaks in bad weather, and faulty plumbing. But she wouldn't have swapped that place for anywhere else in the world.