So I'm flying off home to Germany tonight, and I no longer need to apply for college (since I've a place), so why not blog one of my now-useless essays which I had intended to submit and make it a tad less useless?
If the world were art-less, I doubt I would choose the option of life over oblivion, I recently remarked to a friend over tea. I rarely exaggerate, and this is no exception. What a tragedy that so many newly-developed countries shun art, thinking it "impractical" and "inessential", and that my home country counts as one of them. Singapore suffers from a terminal stage of what I term the "Asian Materialism Syndrome", a disease I diagnosed her with after she left me inexplicably "empty" after just four brief years. Unlike San Francisco and Berlin, two cities I had previously called home, life seemed overwhelmingly "sterile". Perhaps it is not clear that culture simply cannot be engineered, despite the futilely dauntless efforts of certain governments and societies. Some fail to fathom that culture is not to be found solely in the concert halls and museums of a metropolis, but on its streets and in its back-alleys too. And if even Chinatown in an Asian capital has to be meticulously engineered, something is clearly awry. For two years, this desire to be "filled" by art plagued me while I served in the army - it is not easy for concrete skyscrapers and prefab housing to inspire a human being above and beyond the mundane.
Probing aural art more closely, I do additionally veer towards inarticulateness when it comes to describing music. After all, "[music] commences where speech ends." (Alphonse de Lamartine). It is something that gnaws at my core and drains me, yet fills me to the point of cathartic excess. There is something just so noble and so penetrating about the sound that a piano creates that stirs me more than it does others, in a way that all else is incapable of - especially the sound of that old upright piano sitting in its dusty corner of our living room. It is a trove of memories of my past 19 years of existence, its threadbare hammers having experienced all of my agony and ecstasy, my passions and my sadness. It was akin to an old friend I could rely on, or rather one that I could invariably force into empathising or rejoicing with me. I lived vicariously through it, and it "lived" vicariously through me. It saw me grow up, in technique and emotion, and I grew up through it, sensing and thinking ever more astutely.
I breathe in the cultures and landscapes of the world when time prevents me from traveling, seeing the world without ever having to leave the piano bench. Much of my interior maturity was born through this wonderful, living instrument, and never will I neglect what that old piano and its enticing art taught my heart and my mind.
These brief encounters unblinded me - I could suddenly "breathe" once more. Art, no matter how vast a concept, dictates the movements of my heart and my mind, filling my life with an indescribable richness and beauty. This is its power and its allure.
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