To even pose this question is a credit to our humanity, the fact that we are not mindless machines, any more than we exist only to survive. Machines don’t write poems. ChatGPT might, but it could not have done so without the repository of poetry written by a long line of poets. And to merely breathe and call it a life is an insult to our creativity as a species. Science and commerce are necessary, no doubt. But so is art – paintings, sculpture, music, dance, novels, poetry, the works.

But why? Why do some of us invest so much of our time and energies to doing something that doesn’t bring food to the table, cure a disease or advance the speed of computing? I love to ponder over difficult questions and this one has been churning inside me for the longest time. Here is my take on why we make art.

To cut to the chase, I would say, it is because “we can.” This is not a tongue-in-check repartee. I truly admire the imaginative capability of our species, which is another way of saying that we make art because we can and are constantly surprised and delighted by it. We may not be anywhere close to the genius of Michelangelo, Titian or Picasso, but each of us hold seeds of creativity we may not even know exist. I personally vouch for this when I retire in 2018 after toiling for thirty five years as an academic. Faced with so much free time on my hands, I began to chart new ways to occupy myself fruitfully. I turned to blogging (hence this blog). I took up painting, I rekindled my love affair with classical music, and I started reading and writing poetry, publishing some in online journals. I am no Michelangelo or Robert Frost, but I don’t need to be to feel the exhilaration of learning the arts, having spent most of my career in the sciences. I now feel more complete; making art has opened up spaces in me that I’m only beginning to savor emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. This is what art does to the soul.

So, my simple thesis is that we make art because firstly we can, and secondly it is beneficial to our wellbeing. Clearly, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Through human history, scores of people have discovered the delights of making art in some form. Long before we have a system of language, our ancestors expressed themselves through pictures (cave paintings), and scribbles (cuneiform, hieroglyphs, oracle bone scripts). From these humble beginnings, flowed the world’s first known poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh written on clay tablets some 5,000 years ago. And there has been no stopping ever since. In words, songs and pictures, every literate culture began to dip their toes into art, going knee deep as time went by, creating some of the most stunning art mankind has ever known. It was as if we’ve let the creative genie out and he is not about to be restrained in any way.

I will conclude this personal essay by linking my thoughts to two prominent poets who have greatly inspired me. The first poet is the great Arab-Armenian artist, poet, and philosopher, Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931). Here is an excerpt of what Gibran wrote in one of his beautiful love letters to the American educator, Mary Haskell.

“I would open my heart and carry it in my hand so that others may know also, for there is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed. We all want that little light in us to be taken from under the bushel … The first poet must have suffered much when the cave-dwellers laughed at his mad words. He would have given his bow and arrows and lion skin, everything he possessed just to have his fellow men know the delight and passion which the sunset had created in his soul. Is it not this mystic pain, the pain of not being known, that gives birth to art and artists?”

The second artist whose thoughts I like to share is the great Chilean poet and diplomat, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). Neruda’s life story is one of passion and perseverance devoted to poetry, evidenced by the “storms and fire” he had to endure to pursue his art. Although his father was against the young Neruda for aspiring to be a full-time poet, Neruda persisted and found a mentor in the diplomat and poet Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) who would later become the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, a distinction Neruda himself would repeat in 1971.

In an extraordinary speech read at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm in December 1971, Neruda recounted his arduous journey to Argentina to escape Chile’s dictatorial government who ordered his arrest on account of his extreme leftist politics. Here’s an excerpt of that speech:

“There were no tracks and no paths, and I and my four companions, riding on horseback, pressed forward on our tortuous way, avoiding the obstacles set by huge trees, impassable rivers, immense cliffs and desolate expanses of snow … Each of us made his way forward filled with limitless solitude… We were in a dazzling world of nature which at the same time was a growing menace of cold, snow and persecution. Everything became one: the solitude, the danger, the silence, and the urgency of my mission.”

Ponder again on the last sentence, and you can almost feel the loneliness of Neruda’s struggle. It was not only a struggle for physical safety; it was “the urgency” of a mission – to have the freedom to pursue his art as a way of meaning-making. Summing up his life, Neruda leaves us with these unforgettable words, almost echoing the counsel of Kahlil Gibran:

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance.”

Postscript

From Argentina, Neruda moved to Asia where he spent several years working as a consul in Yangon, then in Jakarta while writing poems about the peoples of Asia he saw were downtrodden by poverty, colonial rule, and political oppression. In 1933, he returned to his native Chile to serve diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain. He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle. He continued to write books of poetry despite limited commercial success, and did so to his last days.