Quite possibly, the most terrifying and detrimental fight in the entire universe is the one that takes place within each human being, as long as he or she can be classified as such from an evolutionary perspective.
I am talking about the fight between the beauty of life, on one hand, and its vanity, on the other.
Blessed and cursed – seemingly, that is to our knowledge, like no other creature in the whole Creation – ever since conscience, the ability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong, took shape and form within him, man is living his life, constantly hovering between acceptance and embracement and refusal and appalling denial of what is happening.
This is the existential, impossibly and infinitely fragile, balance – or ballad – stemming from the never-ceasing tension between beauty and horror, between love and terror, that nobody can ever escape from, that no one could ever live without.
And things become even worse in the case of a true creator or artist.
He or she is uniquely privileged and irrevocably condemned to experience the full and unfiltered tension between these two relentless and equally – infinitely – powerful cosmic forces; his or her psychosomatic condition eternally oscillating among the glorious and blissful heavens of true beauty and the abysmal pain and hopelessness of the foundational meaninglessness of it all.
In that sense, Creation – if I may subjectify her – displays her inherent quality of the most rigid fairness and unperturbed tendency for equilibrium, which far surpasses the respective quality of the most ruthlessly and relentlessly fair – in the sense of scholastically and unequivocally complying with the letter of the Law – judge.
In plain words, the more you know, you feel and you create, the greatest your joy and the more painful your suffering.
In this vein, a basic task of every man and woman, and especially of the artists amongst them, is to realise that this is how things work.
[Attention: realisation does not equal, or even automatically allow for, acceptance].
As soon as this realisation has happened, the artist of life stands before a big choice.
Will he or she accept this fundamental truth and act within the confines it creates or will he or she go against it, clashing with the inevitable and almighty equilibrium of infinite tension?
Regardless of what his or her decision is, the artist can create works of miraculous complexity, of unparalleled usefulness, of awe-inspiring beauty.
However, in the second case, the case of non-acceptance of the natural overarching state of things, his or her works become testaments of the incomparably tragic fate of the human being; thus acting as beacons – more like everlasting, if flickering, candles in the all-encompassing darkness, actually – of the only true hope of our species:
To not exist anymore; to transcend its very self; to become what is not.
