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From The Minister of Arts

September A.S. 18

Thomas Buttesthorn

How often have you heard a beautiful haunting song or poem? Or seen an exquisite piece of lace or embroidery (or indeed anything of beauty) and felt humbled and inadequate? How often in this mood of despair, have you wished that you could create something that could even approach a shadow of this beauty? How long have you suppressed this desire, this yearning because "I can’t do it" or "people will laugh"?

The Art of Creating, of taking the stuff of dreams and imagination and translating it into something that you can hand another (or many others), is a kind of magic. It is, in a sense something like the alchemy of changing lead into gold. One takes the dull drabness of a blank piece of paper and transforms it into a poem. One takes the random sounds of plucked catgut, nylon, or steel wires and orders them in to a song.

What creating is not, although it may seem otherwise, is something that mere mortals (read, you) are incapable of accomplishing. Creating is a sort of magic that is woven by people, by sentient beings, rather than the random (or semi random) frolicking of chance and nature. Certainly not that of gods.

Yes, it calls for a sense of heightened awareness and sensitivity, and the very best calls for sophisticated skill in articulating this. But it is done by humans. I presume that everyone, to some extent, falls into this category.

The sensitivity can be inborn, but it can also be acquired. It calls for shaking off the numbness, the extrasensory deprivation of this isolated, lonely age in which humans and in fact everything are reduced to numbers, formulae, and abstractions. It grows from using your senses to see and feel those things that you may always have taken for granted.

Notice the flower. Think about the bee that joins itself to that flower and the mutual life giving process that takes place. Feel the wind, let it feel you. You have the same senses that DaVinci, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Mozart and all of the creators of all time had.

The difference is that they used them in ways that were unique. But you have something that none of them had: your own unique mind, heart, sensitivities and skills.

Creation is not a static non sequitor that has already happened and now belongs in a museum or a used book shop. It is a dynamic, glorious force that propels us, it gives us life, and it is fed generation after generation by new people who dare to push human experience and expression further than ever before.

It need not be fed only by the truly gifted few, it can be fed by everyone if only they search for the way. It may be true that some people will always create transcendental works, but this is no cause to feel ashamed of one’s own efforts. Furthermore, you may discover upon the attempt, that you have truly created something worthwhile and of value. You never know until you try.

- Lord Thomas Buttesthorn

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