A thought I had

You know how every so often you get one of those flashes of truth, where you feel like your whole existence and all of history is wrapped up in that one little moment of realization? It's like when you're listening to a song and suddenly you can smell your grandma's house. Do you know what I mean? I hope you do. In Buddy's letter to Zooey in "Franny and Zooey," he talks about how he had a moment like that, when the little girl in the supermarket told him that she had two boyfriends named Bobby and Dorothy. He rushed home to write to Zooey about it, but by the time he got there, it was gone. And I can sympathize with that, because by the time you go to write it down, it's always gone, even if you try to write it that every second. It's just a moment, and it was meant to be.

But the point is that I kind of had one of those moments yesterday, and even though I can't really tell you the moment itself, I can kind of tell you what it was about. I realized that making art is about taking things out of context. When studying art (and by art I mean a lot of different things like music and literature as well as painting or photography), we are always taught to put it into context, to look at the life of the artist, and the history of the time period, and the circumstances that surround each individual piece. But I think that by doing that we are taking away it's very essence, and in a sense we are taking the art right out of it.

Because nothing is really beautiful in context. Around every beautiful thing there is something mundane or depressing or just flat out ugly, and if you look at the context, the whole, all you'll ever see is the predictability and the mediocrity. But the whole point of beauty is to take something out of that mediocrity and put it in a frame and say "Look at this tiny little thing. Isn't it amazing?" It's not the typical pathetic every-day conversation that's beautiful, but one ordinary phrase, when taken out of this context, can bring you to your knees.

And that's what happened to me yesterday. I was walking back from work and I noticed on a purely intellectual level that it was a beautiful day. And I was sad that I couldn't feel that it was a beautiful day, because I was also looking at the parking lot and the cement buildings. But then for an instant, just a tiny moment, a sun ray hit me just right and the grass looked so green and for a moment the context was gone and that is when I had the moment.

And since I am assuming that the goal of any form of art is to inspire moments such as these (this assumption based solely on the fact that this would my goal if I were an artist), my advice to the world is to get rid of the context. Who needs it, anyway?