The Necessity of the Unnecessary | the quest for inspiration ch 4

I recently had the pleasure of attending a concert at which two of my good friends were playing and there I was treated to a masterful performance of Shostakovich. Now, classical music is by no means my forte nor am I your general concert goer, but one thing in particular has stuck me, from the performances I have attended, and that is the complete unnecessity of it all and the beauty that brings.

I wrote a few months ago about the freedom of looking only to the necessary things of life: food, warmth, shelter, but that was not to say that we should live simply as beasts of necessity, living only to survive. No, for we are created for so much more than that.

Senneca is quoted as saying ‘Art is but imitation of nature.’ And in so many ways, he is right. Not only is art, itself, drawn from and inspired by nature, but the very nature that resides within us and leads us to create, curate, sample, and taste art, is, itself, but imitation of God.

He who first called out the stars in their thousands, he who spread wide the wings of the morning and shackled the seas in their place, he who saw sights we can only imagine, saw life, and saw it was good. the creator that shaped and formed us from dust, indued in us a fragment of that nature.

But is there a difference? What of the meaning of art, human art is so often formed to share something deeper than its form alone, can this be said to be an imitation of nature, what deeper meaning is hidden in the stars or what lesson does the rising sun reveal?

The warrior-poet, king David, saw the meaning in the beauty and the purpose in the art.

'The heavens declare the glory of God; 

the skies proclaim the work of his hands… 

They have no speech, they use no words;    

no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,    

their words to the ends of the world.'

Psalm 19 v1-4 NIV

This creating, sharing, enjoying of art, of beauty for the sake of beauty, our inclination to form stories, to capture and reflect meaning, from the writer’s pen to the orchestra’s symphony, our art tells a greater story, that no artist could claim as their own. Our offerings of art, however small they are, join themselves with the chorus of the stars in singing praise to God, the giver of every good thing. And that, after all, is all we could ever dream to do.

So let us embrace the ‘unnecessary’ and laugh and cry, write, paint, play, and sing, pausing in life to breathe in the warm honeysuckle-air of spring; knowing that these moments hold forth an imitation of the nature of our King.

- Robert.