Let’s think about “self expression”!
They say even babies express themselves. “Hungry!!”, “Need new diaper!!”, “Don’t like this!!” they express all kind of emotion and and those tend to be stronger than what adults express.
Babies.. are they really expressing them selves? Or only crying to show their emotions?
Let’s imagine babies smiling for something. What they are smiling about or to, we don’t know, but we often feel something from baby’s smile.. something warm that we can’t really put into words.
The difference between crying and smiling.
Crying is to show their emotions to make us realize something. Almost insisting on something.
On the other hand, smiling is to let us feel something or we feel something as we see them smile.
This is how real “expression” should be!
Something we feel that we can’t put into words.
Some people might argue, “what about the literature? they try to tell us something, something concrete, like babies crying!
Is literatures not expression?”
The literatures often have very concrete theme, that it wants readers to understand.
But at the same time, a good literature has its own music.
Words are not a binary command. They can also express something similar to what baby’s smile tell us.
When we have certain conversation, depending on the choice of words, we sometimes feel offended and with different wordings, even on the same subject, we might even feel happy or tender.
What causes these differences? Its our own feeling that arises out of particular choice of words.
So, the key factor is” “the something we can’t really describe”.
I am terrible at drawing, painting, any of those stuff. I think I am the worst in the entire universe.
One day back in the states, I had a 1st semester Asian student who could not understand English well and
needless to say, Japanese.
In the course of conversation, I wanted to explain “a grasshopper”, and the student did not get it.
So, I draw the grasshopper on the whiteboard. I ended up writing some creature that doesn’t exist in this whole planet!
But such a terrible person (me!) with no talent in drawing even can feel something when I see a good picture or painting.
This picture totally brought me in to its own world when I saw this in Metropolitan Museum NY years ago.
This is a fairly small picture and it was displayed on the wall right next to the corridar between 2 huge exhibitions.
The moment I saw this picture, I felt like it was spotlighted and it was as if no other pictures came into my sight.
Later on I learned about this artist and his artistic concept and some explanation about this painting. (This great artist is Mr.Rene Magritte!)
But those are not the point here. the point is that spotlight that only I could see!
I use the ‘spotlight” only because I don’t think I can explain the detail of the feeling I had then, in any other way.
The only way to describe it is by using metaphor.
In our daily life, we have so many feelings we can’t put into words.
The feeling we have when communicating with somebody, the feelings that comes from the wind, sunshine, the air.
We have undescribable feeling everyday, every moment.
I believe we are now living in the era when everybody including artists, art lovers, non artists, everybody, are in need to start paying close attention to the feeling that “undescribable”, because that is the reflection of true expression.
This might be a key point to when we thing of the ways to co-exist with AI that I pointed on the previous blog.