Art and Fear

I had a bit of writer's block today as far as the blog, so I put the call out of Facebook for inspiration. My favorite teacher, Ms. Vance, posed a very thought-provoking prompt, as follows:

Truman Capote identified fireworks and conversation as his favorite art forms. What are yours? And what are your (similarly, most unusual) fears? Where have these arts and fears manifested?

This is a HUGE question and any one person could write volumes on it. I have a blog and will attempt to do this question justice, as it could cover many aspects of my life and nearly all of my future.

My favorite artforms. This presents itself in so many fashions. My favorite artforms would be story-telling and photography. Story-telling is by far my favorite of favorites because it takes so many shapes. It can be verbal, full of rhythmic cadences and lyrical tones, painting a scene through sound. It can be literature, leaving everything to the imagination, every color hiding between the black and white. It is so universally relatable and so personal, because it has infinite possibility to be made one's own. No one person will read, tell, or interpret a story identically to another. Each experience is unique to the individual audience, while simultaneously connecting the greater audience, sharing ideas. People who live a world away from each other could share a common sentiment from reading the same piece of literature; people who have nothing in common, but a story, can feel connected, because they have vicariously lived through the author and the characters. We can all cry when Cinderella can't go to the ball because we experience her sadness, experience rage at the unjust, untimely, and faster-than-a-breath "death" of Sirius Black, the unbridled joy and odd sense of relief when Elizabeth ends up with Darcy, and the heart-stopping, ice-cold fear of just about any Stephen King novel. While we experience all of these second-hand through the characters, we do experience them, and we experience them so much more keenly because we make the stories our own. We immerse ourselves, whether in listening or reading, and we become the character, lived over and over through eyes and minds of many. Stories themselves are an artform, but there is just something so wonderfully beautiful and ubiquitous about the way a story is and can be told.

My other favorite artform, in a more direct interpretation of "art", is photography. I not only enjoy producing it, but viewing it and gathering inspiration from it. Candid to carefully and meticulously planned, unaltered to edited beyond fantasy, photography is special. It puts a direct focus on the world around as and screams "PAY ATTENTION". It stops us in our tracks, even for a moment. and forces us to pause and analyze. It stimulates our want to understand and to appreciate a moment. "Why did someone photograph this?" we wonder. Whether it confuses us, shocks us, awes us, or simply makes us smile, all photography elicits emotion, and even more-so because, even after edits, it is still drawn from our physical world, our surroundings. A photograph is not a photograph if it does not, at its base, start with the real world.  That, to me, is what makes photography so fascinating. Unedited, it reflects real and simple beauty and is almost reassuring as it whispers "This exists". Altered, photos can extend beyond fantasy, taking the limited that physically exists and creating what might or never can be, reaching far and deeply into our imaginations.

For me, I love taking photography because it captures my world in a permanent manifestation of my point of view. There is no better feeling for me than going through photos and finding memories that have been lost or candid moments captured perfectly or re-experiencing the beauty of a moment or a place. It is entirely selfish, but I photograph for me, to capture and recapture my life, to call upon physical representations of my memories as often as I choose. 

Being able to share these memories as well is beautiful to me, whether is is my photography or someone else's. It is story-telling without words. It can be a series or a single image, answer questions or produce many. Photographs can be viewed again and again and interpreted in a different way every time. There is something so unique and special about that and there is an endless amount possibilities to test and discover.

I am now going to move into fears. There are the obvious: needles, spiders, pain. Survival, base fears. My deeper fears all seem to revolve around loneliness. One of my biggest fears is non-recognition. I certainly don't want to seem or be self-centered or expect people to kiss the ground I walk on, but if I do a good job or if I put a lot of effort into something, I would like a pat on the back. I do not complete a project or perform simply for this praise, but the praise lets me know that I am doing something right. Therefore, I suppose this is actually a fear of being wrong. I dread imperfection in myself, not fulfilling my potential, or fearing that my potential is, in fact, not perfection. This nearly unattainable envisionment of myself is the cause of near-constant anxiety. Praise allows for a temporary relief of this anxiety. In that moment of praise, in my mind, I am perfect, I am right, I have earned my A+, my 100%, I have not disappointed. Unfortunately, there is a fine line between appreciating praise and literally relying on and expecting it, and I fall into the latter. It is not a matter of ego, it is not a matter of pride. For me, I just cannot bear to be a disappointment. Anger may scare me and make me cry, but it will never utterly crush me the way the words "I'm disappointed" do. Anger implies a mistake whereas disappointment implies intent or lack of caring. I take great care in everything that I do, either in thoroughness or in eagerness, so to be disappointing completely renders all of my effort as null. There is no greater mental and spiritual fear for me than this.

For me, these two tie together. I gain small pats on the back through my photography. A main character in a story is hardly ever a disappointment. I can escape my anxieties, even briefly, through these mediums and that makes them all the more powerful in my mind. They are essentially therapeutic. 

This has been a very long blog, but I thank Ms. Vance for the inspiration, as this was actually enjoyable to write. I haven't had a really in depth blog in a while and this genuinely felt good to write.

What would you say if you were answering these questions?