There are two types of world. There is the familiar world of the outside. And then there is the world we all carry around inside of us - our inner life. The richness or lack thereof of this inner life is imprinted on the faces of most people. Vacuity. This lack of a rich inner life betrays itself in the way they are prey to the wiles of every external stimulii. How every tinkle of a bell, every peal of laughter, every raised voice, every blaring horn, every beautiful girl, every molecule from the Kebab-wallah - causes them to flit and stir hither and thither; dart their eyes left and right; eyes constantly roving, never sitting still - restless, fidgety, timorous. A billion buzzing movements like a bumble-bee hive.
He who has a multi-layered, multi-faceted, inner life can go and hide in the sanctuary it provides - hideth from the uncouth mob that is the world! But, if you have no inner life, no recess, no shade - what do you do? Well, you do nothing. You lie exposed to the furies. You have no leeward sheltering cave. Here's a question though: can you tell, just by looking at someones face, whether their inner life is rich or poor? I don't think you can - not from the face anyway. But, you can tell from careful observation of the rest of the body: assuredness of movement, apathy to the sights and sounds of proximal stimuli, a thoughtful (or meditative) countenance, a book (maybe I am biased here!), the ability to peer into the world; or at least engage with it, from the aperture of one's inner self - these are all signs of a rich inner depth.
The analogy of the aperture is apt and I will explore it further. The aperture is the hole in a camera that can shrink or expand, thus controlling the amount of light that is let in. If one is wise, one can use the inner self like an aperture to control the amount of the world to let in at any given moment. On a trip to say Tibet or Nepal the aperture should be wide open to let in as much of this fresh alien world as possible. But back at home, in the dull suburbs of london under a dull November sky, the aperture should be shrunken to allow one to contemplate & chew & assimilate & think over, that which got in in Tibet.
And then...like the digestion of a meal, what follows is a distillation; a pot-pourri of descriptive, emotional, poetic, rational, polemical, peregrinating, thoughtful, meandering, critical, incisive, pithy, funny, hilarious, sensual, cool - words on a page! That is my art. That is what I do. That is my vocation. I imbibe the world; I swallow it through the lining of my eyes and ears and mouth and skin and nostrils - and after passing it through my guts, and my heart; after washing it in the black billious bile of my gall bladder, after coating it in Saturnine bleakness and studding it with the occasional diamond and finally after processing it in my brain - what emerges, are these very words! Voila!
Mesdames et Messieurs, I give you: My progeny. My reproductions. My darling babies. See how they dance on the page these fiery fancies.
Who was it that said: 'the unexamined life is not worth living'?
Ah yes, Plato.
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