Following is a link to the second part of an article by Steven Winn on Art and what it does to the unconscious, what happens in us. It is beautiful and perhaps the highs and the lows are what bring us to it, in production or consumption. We need it. We sing, write, sculpt, paint, play an instrument, dance. We are immortal in art.
Here is the last paragraph of Steven Winn's article. I love the phrase, "that went through me like light through glass."
Steven Winn:
"And then, late in the second act, Labelle began an aria ("Regard, O son, my flowing tears") that went through me like light through glass. The spun-silver phrases, the soft tides and surges of the orchestra, one exquisitely wrenching interval all poured in, weightless and shining. It went on and on, and was over before it started. "The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable," the writer Italo Calvino once remarked. I was out there, afloat. That's all I can really tell you about what happened that night."
May we all have experiences like that.
Check out the article, and the one before it in the SF Chronicle yesterday:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/29/DDG81Q1THL1.DTL