Art is the lab where emotions are altered, edited and designed to create a parallel universe capable of reviving human faith in a liveable and tolerable world.
Dr. Jernail Singh Anand
Art is the lab where emotions are altered, and then artered, edited and designed to create a parallel universe capable of reviving human faith in a live-able and tolerable world.
What ordinary men have no idea of, though they live through the domain of suffering, it is only an artist who can create an aesthetic emotion from a general feeling of pain. When we face real suffering, horror and pain overtake us, making us its victims. But when this suffering comes to us through the prism of art, with an artistic or aesthetic distance between the suffering and the observer, the artist is able to add to the experience, a stance how to look at it. It is just like editing an emotion or designing an emotion, where he adds his own perception to it.
This is how an artist creates an aesthetic emotion, and a parallel universe in which the horror is subtracted and what remains behind is catharsis.
I will call it altered emotion because it is different from the original flow of emotion. The raw emotions are like little sprouts which appear on the breast of the earth. But an artist alters them, and then, displays them after he has dressed them in a new makeover, so as to evolve a point of view as he thinks of a particular situation.
Politicians are also lower time artists adept at altering an unguarded emotion which is then, displayed in public as if it were devil’s uttering. However, I am today concerned with the aesthetic emotion, which is created when the poet adds his imagination and his entire being to a particular moment.
ART AND ALTERED EMOTION
Art is actually a realm of altered emotions. A better description would be ‘artered’ emotion. When we say altered emotion, there is a risk of the truth losing to an untruth or even to a half truth. Are artistic emotions just created truths? At the heart of art, is a fact of life which stirs the soul of the artist. And he builds up a whole universe of imaginative reality on the tip of that truth.
Imagination is an aery structure built with the mortar of fantasy. Fantasy may have a dynastic relationship with its poor cousin’s lies and untruths, but it belongs to royalty. An artist is a talented connoisseur of art and life too, and he lets his mind on a guided tour to fantasization, which remains flying very close to the earth. It can gaze keenly at the earthly truth and at the same time, have a sweeping vision of it in its entirety. This is the beauty of the Aesthetic Vision which imparts immanence to an Aesthetic Emotion.
An artist through his imagination turns an ordinary fact of life into a special occasion to engage in a dialogue with the universe and makes it give the impression of an epical truth. An Epical Truth is different from ordinary truths of our lives. It involves man’s being which further involves the scales of his living and perception.
The situations created in art and literature may be fictional, but the artist’s vision imparts them an imaginative authenticity and prophetic sanctity. By creating situations which run parallel to truth, art creates emotional states which are benefic for reviving the faith of the people in a live-able and a tolerable world.
Read: The Cultured Emotion
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Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, President of the International Academy of Ethics, is author of 161 books in English poetry, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy and spirituality. He was awarded Charter of Morava, the great Award by Serbian Writers Association, Belgrade and his name was engraved on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. The Academy of Arts and philosophical Sciences of Bari [Italy] honored him with the award of an Honorable Academic. Recently, he was awarded Doctor of Philosophy [Honoris Causa] by the University of Engineering and Management, Jaipur. Recently, he organized an International Conference on Contemporary Ethics at Chandigarh. His most phenomenal book is Lustus: The Prince of Darkness [first epic of the Mahkaal Trilogy]. Email: anandjs55@yahoo.com
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