Așchii de inspirație // Splinters of Inspiration

Chaos

You need to express the chaos that resides inside yourself. It doesn't always have to look beautiful, or at least beautiful in a conventional way. Nobody forces you to only write clever rhymes or lyrical, rich descriptions. Your music shouldn't consist only of perfect harmonies and coherent melodies. You aren't limited to drawing inside the lines or using only colors that match with one another.

Embrace the entropy. Accept that your world might make no sense to others. Because, after all, it doesn't make complete sense even to you, you who are both the creator and the creation, you who made yourself out of yourself, you who live in your mind and should know each and every hidden corner of it.

The truth is, nothing makes sense, really. We try to fool ourselves in thinking that we have a purpose, that we understand the machinations of the Universe, that we, feeble piles of matter, matter. But all of this is a lie. A sweet fable that keeps us from completely falling apart.

And what else keeps us from falling apart, while having a constant toll on our health, both physical and mental?

Chaos.

We are made of chaos. Inside and outside and in between and everywhere else. We owe our existence to it. It owes its persistence to us. Symbiosis at its finest. But sometimes we need to let our inner chaos out, otherwise it will end up devouring us, turning us from the beautiful and complex amalgam that we are to an empty, withered carcass.

Artists? They have even more chaos in their composition than anyone else. Every person lives under the blessed curse of chaos, but artists feel its pressure during every waking moment. Even in their dreams.

A repressed artist is no different from a savage beast. They isolate themselves, they lash out because of the fear that incessantly clouds their judgement and they hurt others, attempting to distract themselves from the bleeding of their own heart. One can sense the fear and the pain in their eyes, and hear the strain in their voice, which sometimes amounts to nothing more than a faint whisper and at times rises to a hoarse, excruciating scream.

Artists have to use their art to free themselves from their burden. Otherwise, their inner chaos will take over them. Simple as that. No rocket science.

For far too many times it's been said that an artist's world is supposed to be made only of beauty and grace. For far too many times it's been implied that only geniuses have the right to liberate  themselves from their chaos, while the lesser ones are obliged to suffer in silence. Far too many artists have lost their way before even starting their journey, forever aspiring to emulate the shadows of various previous prodigies and convincing themselves that if they did otherwise, it meant that they would fail.

Remember, even if you aren't a titan, you can still be a god.

You need to set your chaos free, in the same way you need to breathe. It has no importance whatsoever if the people around you will praise you for fulfilling one of your bare necessities, if they will disregard your actions or if they will scoff at them, viewing them as an utter failure or proof of folly.

Every morning, when your nightmares drag you from your scarce sleep, remind yourself that failure doesn't exist. There's only chaos. Only chaos, internal and external, and it's your responsibility to tame it. But in order to tame it, you must let it loose first.

Guide your chaos. Let it guide you. Write down endless strings of disparate, meaningless words. Sing the haunting melody that lives in your head, even if it doesn't fit a certain style or if it keeps changing its tonality from measure to measure. Hit the keyboard of an imaginary piano and play random chords, from F minor to C sharp major, ignoring the rules from any dissertation thesis on music theory ever made. Splatter contrasting colors on a canvas and sketch doodles in a tattered notebook. Do patchwork from multiple arts and melt all the boundaries in the fire of your passion.

Free your chaos. Free yourself. Dare in dissonance, revel in irrationality, experiment in uncertainty and venture into lunacy. Who cares that the result will never rise to the level of your predecessors' creations or that other people might not even recall its existence when the current century ebbs away?

Although your inner chaos might seem impossible to arrange into a nice, neat shape at the very beginning, it still holds the potential to rework itself into pure beauty, like a fantastic, self-built and self-evolving perpetuum mobile. But this evolution will never occur if you hinder it by stifling your impulses to create, just because you see them as hideous and useless.

Don't strive for perfection. Seek expression instead, expression for its own sake. For your own.

And for your chaos.

Drinking game: Take a shot each time I use the word chaos lmao