“Pure Art”
What could make pure art? Obviously it cannot be created with notes of music and instruments, nor with paints and brushes, nor with cameras, nor with marble and chisels, since every medium has gross limitations. A medium is not full of life. We can bring it to life, but by itself it does not live. And we can never express everything. We do not have the means.
Photograph by John Diamond, M.D.
I stand in the woods and I see and hear and feel and sense the glory and the love, the overpowering godliness of all the trees and birds around me and the earth beneath me. If I try to put that to music, I can only at best capture a millionth of it. And how am I to paint it? I can only paint a little of what I see and even less of what I feel and know. Am I to paint this tree or that? Or those few? I cannot paint them all. I cannot communicate the totality of the experience. I can highlight one bit of it, but I can not impart the totality of it. And what if you and I try to photograph it; our lenses cannot take it all in. So we each choose a bit, but we are going to choose differently. We can only come back with a tiny bit of the totality.
We cannot express through any medium all that is happening to us at any moment. We have to abstract – take a bit and highlight it – but we cannot express it all.
I cannot assimilate through every pore of my body, as if somehow I were a sphere that had placed myself in the middle of that forest and absorbed everything, and then put myself as that sphere into the middle of your living room and transmit it all to you throughout 360 degrees. If I could do that, then perhaps you would be able to feel the presence of God, the overwhelming glory and grandeur of nature that I experienced in the forest. And that would be pure art. There would be no medium: no paint, no music, no writing, no speech. There would be just my being – pure art.
Excerpt from The Life Energy in Music, Vol. 3
