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BY RHICK LARS VLADIMER ALBAY
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Tuesday, March 14, 2017
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“The mind sees and the mind hears. The rest is blind and deaf.” – Epicharmus
MILLENNIA ago, the hunters stained their fingers with the blood of animals and the sap of trees. Their thumbs traced shapes of oxen and mammoths on cave walls with the hopes of preserving their stories and the images of what they have seen outside the darkness of their caverns.
All circles of art are, one way or another, in the form of an illusion. Images and paintings mimic reality, capturing and preserving a moment, an event, keeping it forever. Through stories and poetry, we see the world from the eyes of a different person, another character, and we experience his or her encounters with it. Music and dance can make us feel an array of sensations even if we were merely listening, watching.
The priestesses of gods and goddesses long forgotten danced around flames, their hands imitating the flight of birds, the sway of their hips moving in time with the throbbing of drums. Often, their ceremonies were held to appeasethe deities they worshipped, to whom they offered the movement of their bodies and the loudness of their music.
In the beginning, art was a way of seeing further than what the eyes could see. It could be illusions to explain what could hardly be understood, and emotions of what could barely be put into words. Ancient artists sculpted gods and goddesses though having no concreteidea of what they truly looked like. Ancient poets wrote odes and songs about love, putting into words the most fleeting and complex of passions.
Oracles and seers once sang their prophecies, of plagues and new kings and fallen empires. Their voices rose above the sound of footsteps on marble and the rustling of an assembly of bird’s wings. Their predictions carried and spread by the whispers of the townspeople, their hymn dispersed. ‘Til a hundred other men and women echoed out the same chant that flew out of their mouths.
The primary role of art has always been to express a person’s significant encounters. Be it an epic, a song, or a dance, each aims to share and impart a narrative, a sentiment, an emotion. The storytellers, the artists, the early hunters, the priestesses, the oracles – they all want to share their unforgettable tales, to somehow make their words and images echo, and be heard and seen by future multitudes. These illusions they wish to live forever. To confound more eyes and ears, teasing the senses of generations to come.
The largest of crowds always gathered around prophets, by whose words could conjure monsters and heroes, and saints and demons. One who could make the sun set and the moon rise at the flick of his tongue. One who could take throngs of people on a journey to the fertile lands or the bottom of the seas by just the sound of his voice; though in truth they we’re merely listening as they sat around the prophet, nothing but black sky above them, their awed faces were lit by fire./PN
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