Superheroes and saints never make art. Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken – from Excellent Advice for Living
Interesting advice for living here. What is art? For many of us this is a painting, a piece of music, a theatrical performance, maybe a garden. In those cases, often inspiration comes from something broken. A broken heart, a tragedy, maybe something else.
Even in software, where I work, we might seek to create something amazing, an artistic piece of code, because we’ve seen other things that were broken and caused problems.
However.
What about love songs, the inspiration of which might be something great. I looked for some, but in most of the lyrics, there seems to be something broken. I Will Always Love You is popular, but seems to be a relationship that isn’t amazing. Something, one of my favorites has the idea that the the author doesn’t know. There’s some lack of confidence.
Maybe the best one I found is Just the Way You Are (Billy Joel, not Bruno Mars). Here the author doesn’t care about any sort of imperfections of problems, and doesn’t seem to imply there are. He just says I accept you for what you are. That isn’t broken.
In most other songs, the singer, or the object of their affection is broken in some way, so maybe there’s more to this advice than I thought at first.
I’ve been posting New Words on Fridays from a book I was reading, however, a friend thought they were a little depressing. They should be as they are obscure sorrows. I like them because they make me think.
To counter-balance those, I’m adding in thoughts on advice, mostly from Kevin Kelley’s book. You can read all these posts under the advice tag.