What we can learn from art

We use art as a way to make sense of our lives — the reality in which we exist and the reality that exists within us — while helping others make sense of theirs and perhaps giving them a glimpse into ours.

Each of us lives in our own bubble of meanings, logical and emotional connections. Sometimes these bubbles overlap. For example, most of us share an understanding of basic concepts: a dropped cup can break, water makes things wet, and so on. But when it comes to more complex constructs, especially emotional ones, overlap is less common. Think of this system as clusters of 3D bubbles — some intersecting, some diverging — distributed in a warped space. More precisely, they should be multidimensional shapes spanning multiple planes, but it's easier to think of them as bubbles.

Furthermore, these bubbles and their intersections aren't static. They are changing and evolving over time. So our imagined system isn't frozen; it's moving, writhing, and morphing in another dimension, like a tangle of severed tentacles periodically squirted with lemon juice.

The lemon juice here is our experience. You could call it both 'objective' and 'subjective', but in the realm of bubbles, only subjective experience matters — and the subjective reflection of objective experience in our minds. For these bubbles, it doesn't matter if you bent a spoon with your mind; what matters is how the event imprinted itself in your consciousness: did it make the bubble bigger or smaller (and in what direction)? Did it connect to another point (and what bubbles are near that point)? Was it a fleeting ripple, or did it permanently thicken the 'skin' of the bubble?

The skin, by the way, is a crucial factor. Logical and emotional constructs within a bubble aren't all equally stable. Some are well reinforced, some are fragile, barely formed, and some are thinning and fading. This adds another dimension to our picture of multidimensional, ever-shifting bubbles. Even if, by some miracle, two bubbles are perfectly aligned in space and at their anchor points at any given moment, they still won't be identical.

In this wild world of ever-shifting bubbles, art serves as a kind of imperfect and distorted but invaluable photograph. It captures an unimaginably tiny fragment of one bubble while reflecting traces of others.

And since you've made it this far, here's a suggestion: