Making music, or making art in any other form, is to me not just self-expression but also an act of giving. What I give, or hope to give, is not something that comes uniquely from me – my style, my intellectual construction, my individual view, my personal emotions – but something that comes through me: beauty, meaning, a sense that there is something greater than me or any other individual human being. That ‘something greater’ might be Nature, God, Love, Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, Buddha Nature, the Tao, or something even less definable and nameable – but whatever you call it, it’s where beauty and meaning originate, and it’s that that I hope to reflect in my music.
Recently I discovered an article about Rabindranath Tagore that expresses this attitude far more powerfully and poetically than I can. Tagore was a Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter who lived from 1861 to 1941. Hina Khalid’s article ‘Participating in the Divine Playfulness’ beautifully outlines Tagore’s views on the nature and purpose of art and its relationship to that ‘something greater’ (Tagore called it ‘God’, but he was not conventionally religious and it would be a mistake to interpret this in any rigid or doctrinaire way):
PARTICIPATING IN THE DIVINE PLAYFULNESS
… At the heart of Tagore’s cosmology is the notion that the world is joyously sung into being. This creative sonic effusion is not a singular burst of divine activity but is continually resounding through the cosmos in ever-new forms. The world is made up of a dynamically changing and perpetually enchanting stream of notes, each of which reveals what Tagore called the cosmic harmony (sāmañjasya) of the finite and the infinite. Unlike other forms of art where the final artwork gains an independent existence – once a painting, for instance, is completed, the painter withdraws her loving touch – the melodies that emanate from this singer cannot be disjoined from their creative source. The world-song is re-enlivened with each divine exhalation, and the divine voice pulsates through it at every moment. In Tagore’s words: ‘The universe is not a mere echo, reverberating from sky to sky, like a homeless wanderer – the echo of an old song sung once for all… and then left orphaned. Every moment it comes from the heart of the master, it is breathed in his breath.’
This notion of creation as God’s song represents Tagore’s recalibration of the crucial Hindu idiom of līlā. A multi-faceted Sanskrit term with meanings such as ‘sport’, ‘play’, ‘charm’, ‘beauty’, and others, līlā refers to the idea in Hindu cosmologies that God is a free artist who produces and sustains the world through a spontaneously ‘excessive’ overflow of the divine bliss (ānanda). … In short, as a sacred symphony that God freely sings into being, creation flows from, and ever-newly unfolds, the divine abundance.
… In God’s inexhaustible plenitude, to give is to be, … and this dynamic of self-recovery through self-offering represents the archetype for our own activities in the world. In other words, the Tagorean maxim seems to be this: I give, therefore I am.
In Tagore’s aesthetic vision, then, the artist transcends her individual self to inhabit the world in attentive love, and her art, nourished in ‘self-forgetful joy’, in turn sets forth the possibility of self-transcendence for others. In this way, Tagore affirms, a true work of art is ‘always speaking’, calling the recipient out of themselves towards the other. The artist gazes on the world through the eyes of the heart [in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye’], and through this intensive witnessing of reality, sees beyond the surface of things to inhabit, and to illumine, the silent fecundity of created being. Through her creative offerings, the artist responds to, realises and reflects the divine, and in this way, art approximates something akin to worship. The worshipper, like the artist, suspends her quotidian self-orientation to give herself to the God who is perpetually giving Himself to the world.
Elaborating this mode of self-offering, we repeatedly find across Tagore’s poetry the insistence that, through his creative efflorescence, he is only returning to God that which God has already gifted him [art is thus, in this view, an expression of gratitude]. … This joyous cycle of gaining and giving is, for Tagore, the archetype of all our finite activities: to harmonise the tunes of our individual wills with the divine will, we must continually dedicate ourselves and our works to the divine singer, in whose breath we live, move, and have our being.
– Hina Khalid
(The full article is here: https://besharamagazine.org/arts-literature/rabindranath-tagore-participating-in-the-divine-playfulness/)
This sense of exuberance, playfulness, love, joy, beauty, the feeling that ‘creation flows from… the divine abundance’, is what I tried to capture in the images, words and music of my video ‘Of Beauty’:
Neil Buckland
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