Continuing with his theme, Hazrat Inayat Khan explains the need for art and its role as a completion of nature. The first post in the series is here.
No doubt very often man does not live a natural life. That is, his business or profession or responsibility holds him. Some work or some thought for the needs of the body, for bread and butter or any other everyday need holds him and absorbs the whole of his thoughts, so that he becomes useless for the discovery of the beauty and joy and happiness of life. Hence, as we see around us today, life is becoming so difficult and so full of anxiety and trouble and responsibility. From morning till evening man is just loaded with his responsibilities, and toils day and night. He has never a moment to think of the beauty of art. Since art is the first step which leads man to the cause of art, how can a person who has never admired or understood the beauty of art hope to admire or understand the Artist?
So God remains unrecognized, and not through the fault of God but through the fault of man. The Creator in the role of an artist has created His beautiful art, which is not far from human eyes. But man is so engrossed in thoughts and occupations which have nothing to do with that art. All his time and thought and effort are devoted to occupations which never allow him one moment to think of art and admire it and understand and appreciate it. Naturally, then, he remains as if his eyes were covered over from the vision of the Artist. The real purpose of human life was not that man be born to toil for bread and butter; the real purpose of human life was not that man should be avaricious, and compete with his fellow man, and hate him and view another with prejudice, and use the whole of his time in a kind of spirit of rivalry and competition in which there can be no harmony or joy or peace. With the necessarily ever-increasing avariciousness there is an absence of that beauty for which the soul so constantly longs.
It would be no exaggeration to say that all these disagreeable things which go on in this world – wars, diseases and the like – all come from the lack of artistic attitude in life, the lack of a sense of beauty, and the lack of that vision which unites the whole humanity in one center; and this center is God. When man closes his eyes to beauty, he will never think of looking for the beautiful, although beauty is constantly beside him. Behind the beauty, as the Hadith says, God is. “God is beautiful and He loves beauty.” The natural tendency to love and admire beauty is a divine inheritance; it is the spiritual thing which leads to spirituality. Through this tendency one accomplishes one’s spiritual duty in life. When that tendency has gone and religion is left without art, then the religion may be perhaps useful for an inartistic society, but it turns into a sort of formality. One does one thing, one does another; as one does weekday work, so one also does Sunday duty.
Man very often separates nature from art. He considers nature to be different from art; he considers the one superior and the other inferior. But in reality art is that which, by the divinely inherited tendency, plays its role through man. God working in nature with His hidden hands has created nature, and He shows His art in that nature. In the other aspect of art, that which we call “art,” God produces beauty through the human hand and the human mind, and so finishes that which has been left over to be finished and has not yet been finished in nature. Therefore in one respect art is a step forward from nature, although compared with nature art is so limited. Nature is unlimited. But at the same time, art is an improvement of nature.
Seen metaphysically, the artistic spirit of God is satisfied by fulfilling its artistic tendency through the art of the human being. Therefore those who consider art from a higher point of view recognize the artistic impulse not only as a human impulse, not only as brain work, but as a true artistic impulse, as an inspiration in itself. But in order to prepare the mind for the artistic impulse, what is necessary? Does one need some kind of learning, or some kind of study? Is there some preliminary study to be make first? No. It requires a tuning, a bringing of ourselves to an object to whose beauty the human heart can respond, to a beauty which the heart can appreciate. When the heart can concentrate upon beauty, then it works itself up to a certain pitch, for inspiration is not a thing which one can pull upon to obtain as by pulling a rope. Inspiration is a thing which comes only when the heart is tuned to that object, when it is in a position to receive it. Therefore inspired artists have been divinely gifted, and the spirit of art is one, though the arts are so many. When the heart is tuned to the proper pitch, it is not only capable of producing or appreciating one kind of art and beauty, but all kinds.
To be continued…