Art Only Benefits When it Doesn’t Matter
By Bilal Bikile
Something interestingly uneventful occurs when one adopts a life of simplicity. A life of basic needs, a large lack of desire due to a lack of comparison, because one could not exist without the other. It seems the ability to ponder deeply increases, and for revelatory reasons and benefit. Everything changes for the individual. Life opens up within the perspective of only that which truly matters. Family, faith, health, and being good are all one concerns himself with. And that newness lasts as long as it is new and different from their past self and experience, until one finally becomes engulfed in their new reality of basic sustenance, worship, and survival. While still fulfilling and to the fullest extent, one thing in particular dissipates from one’s life. Questions. He loses curiosity for what could be. The curiosity to change that around him goes away when all is in his control under God.
The man who lives on his property, eats from his produce and vegetation which he has planted and pulled, tends to and eats from his own raised livestock, loses the ability to see good in innovation, civilization, change, and progression, by the definition we know it as. And while this is not necessarily a bad thing, it begs the question of art and literature in a place of ease and stagnancy. Not to claim that great art and literature only come about in times of hardship and crisis, although that is the case and proven to a great extent, but rather a question of what purposes art serves? What purpose does literature hold except a temporary ease to the soul and being? Like that of sex and base desire. Do we need revolutionary mindset-changing art and literature to rile up the people, or can we simply do it by bringing people together upon what matters to them? Societies that have heavily relied on art and literature have only created facades of success and prosperity, because what often lies beneath the surface is propagandist intent and ideological perpetuation, more often than not, removed from core faith and belief. Powerful depictions of Jesus in art have not done anything except misguide the whole of Christianity into idolatry; whether they see it that way or not, it brings forth the reality of the spread of Islam, how poetry was not at its forefront, but the very Quran and its teachings were all it took. It took the unabashed reintegration of monotheism, full stop, to change the landscape of modern history forever. And it was only during the height of Islam, the golden era of Andalus, that art became so important that it is still studied today. But what followed that period? The fall of the Islamic empire, for a longer time them ever before.
I am an artist. I am a writer. I profit from, am a supporter and perpetuator of the arts. And I am not afraid to question the importance of my purpose at this time.
“Dismantle your loyalty to any idea. This will help you to see the truth buried in its opposite.”
This is all I am doing. And I am seeing its truth.