Haven - A Place to Go

I call slam poetry “the art of decisions”. Every syllable. Word. Flow. Rhyme. Meaning. Implication. Interconnection, interreferral — is an intentional choice in order to craft a particular experience. Especially since slam poetry is delivered, real-time, with purpose in every breath, gesture, enunciation, and everything that makes a perceivable performance.

I see a parallel in musical design as visual poetry, kins in real-time experience-crafting. I find a haven in the idea of design as “an art of composition and narrative” in Chapter 3 of Artful Design. Constructing a world so convincing, so viscerally alive from its artfulness that it guides the mind toward certain feelings, palpable aesthetics derived from its creative origin. “Using the medium to highlight a narrative, while hiding the medium itself from the mind,” giving rise to an experience that enraptures us — engulfs us with its story.

In the day-to-day, my mind loves searching for these beautiful, ungraspable places where interrelationships of the world coincide. It seems to be where my soul lies — an eternal reaching for the sublime. An artist draws connections that have never been made before, but meld into an essence so familiar, recognizable in its unfamiliarity, and undeniably human. My joy comes in finding these places in everyday life — these places that emerge like unseen spiderwebs billowing forward to catch that chance gleam of sunlight, stopping you in your tracks. Thin, almost nonexistent threads that cause distinct concepts to occupy the same space, overlaying, in a way that just makes sense for me.

“Our design senses are honed by what we find beautiful, useful, and good, and inspiration is taken from wherever one happens to find it.” And it depends on whoever that one is, which is another layer of what makes design so marvelous. My senses are honed in my particular way, and that’s what I have to work with. That’s why working with others is synergistic; our ideas become more than the sum of the individual parts — actually, something entirely different.

And these correlations come from the inherent property of the medium, coalescing its very nature into similar patterns we glean elsewhere. This prompts pondering in both the part of the designer and the viewer. In designing something, we give birth to physical manifestations of interrelationships, these threads that only exist in our head, at times even subconsciously, as abstract concepts of shimmering unnameable emotion.

So I think it’s fun. In creating, we are putting our mind to rest by giving it form. And in so doing, we strive to give the senses and mind of others somewhere to go. A haven created by your originality. They may not view it the same way you do, but all are welcome to follow the path that gleams most indicatively for them.

Ge says to savor these “uncanny connections”, capture and evoke the notion of infinity and infinite notions through finite means, by playing with what is conveyed and how they are represented. Uncanny is definitely a word to describe it. For me, these connections direct me toward the sublime. Giving form to these connections is where I want to live. Maybe, the artist that I am at this moment cares more about giving my ideas form. I want to make something that is meaningful to me. Maybe this is where I am now. The need to create at this junction. To firmly plant myself here where I feel most full of wonder and to keep creating. This is how I want to live my life.

Which is again an abstract notion. I might want to take the step to close that gap.