Knowing Yourself Is Utopia

Untitled (Cubism and Abstract Art). Steven Wolfe, 1955
There are some things better off without an explanation -  It loses its appeal.
Art should be considered among those.

After several days of enduring my creative drought, I found myself bare-footed feeling the soft and dry sand with a pen in one hand and my mind in a different time zone. It is not surprising to have caught myself drifting apart with the soothing sound of the waves crashing against the corals, sweeping my thoughts and worries and leaving nothing but reminiscent memories and dreams. Clearly, the beach has a miraculous power to deepen world’s mysteries and your very own as well. The peaceful environment released me from my own constraints and I let go, for once, of my never-ending search for eternal bliss. When am I going to realize that attempting to dictate over what I should feel is ridiculous, and that a complete state of flawlessness can never be attained? This serious case of obsessive-compulsive disorder has led the uptight side of me take over my decisions and has run my life in the search for a perfect emotional balance. Impossible if you ask me. Coincidently, I happened to read a book about liberating oneself from social and artistic conventions while sitting under the almost unbearable rays of the sun. This book turned out to be exactly what I needed to endorse a change in my life, written in the craziest and most fervent way.

The Seven Dada Manifestos destroys every code and system established in the world of art, yet it can be adapted as a life ideology, a way of living. It promotes spontaneity, immediateness, and contradiction, defends chaos against order, imperfection against perfection. It is based on the absurd and the scandal, rejecting and mocking the imposed order. At first, it was difficult for me to comprehend this random word selection and the end to its mean. As I went along, nevertheless, I began to enjoy the hidden rumor and the ironic and satirical inclination that started to become apparent. It was not beautiful, it was not romantic and it definitely was not logical, so why was it so appealing to me? It was passionate, rebellious, incoherent, and absurd, nothing like I’ve ever read. It showed me that the importance of logic and reason was in fact, not relevant at all. This makes absolutely no sense. Or so you would think. There is not an explanation for life, but we as humans have an exasperating natural desire to find a justification for the unknown, yet sometimes we cannot help but finding none. Dadaism shows that logic, after all, is not that important in situations where emotions count as indispensable. This is so hard for me to recognize, but I finally got my head wrapped around this important message. After I finished, I felt happy.

I desired to reject the mainstream beliefs and to explore the everlasting secrets this little book contained. My creative drought was over. I focused on the prize, which was feeling satisfied about what I wrote, about what I felt. I have no one to blame for my ambivalence, and no one deserved an explanation either. I started looking on the bright side (something I haven’t been able to do for a while) and stopped feeling sorry for myself. I might never become a real Dadaist, but I am pleased with the fact that my emotional and mental stability are completely misbalanced. This disequilibrium is provoking a nonsense uncertainty concerning everything. I am a mess, I swear. It is fine though, I have learned to like my absurdness – it is the very thing that makes me human.

My favorite part of the book:

"A work of art is never beautiful, objectively, for everyone. Criticism is, therefore, useless, no longer existing subjectively, for each, and without any general character. Or perhaps have you found the common physic basis to all manking? How are you planning to order the chaos that constitutes an infinite variance: men?."

Let's be RIDICULOUS.