The main purpose of any piece of art is to show that life is beautiful. But when it comes to writing, this can be done in one single way, by intriguing the reader. Writers have different ways of approaching this issue; some focus on eloquence, which is a way of showing that even the most atrocious event can become beauty when we detach it from the realm of reality. But some authors focus on content, avidly looking for every piece of reality that may startle or some interpretation of life that may move their readers.
I’ve read that some people need a literal bump in the head to start developing their art, and others gain a random ability like speaking Chinese, having good memory or drawing fractals. We know about prodigious classical musicians who composed at the age of eight, and about savants and other oddities. Some people like talking about the unused capacity of our brains, and about our consciousness being just a small lamp in the vastness of our minds’ darkness. Then telepathic skills start sounding plausible. But where do we set the limit to this belief? Are we pro telepathy and why not throw in some telekinesis too? Or do we just simply leave aside every paranormal activity, allowing for only human exploits? In this last case, don’t we believe in evolution? What if it becomes the new normal to be able to tell Paul that his shoelaces are undone without making gestures, moving or speaking? What if exams went out of fashion because students could just transport their minds away to go and seek the answers to the test? Are we allowing for the immense possibility of the human mind? Or are we just playing the God card to answer all these unanswered questions? The same as we glimpse at the vastness of life’s mystery and award it all to one God, now we rationalize everything by saying: Our brain is powerful. But what’s our brain then and where its limits are? Is it really all there is and nothing more? There’s nothing beyond God or, for some people, the human brain.
Now God is a good entity to establish as the supreme origin of everything, because it’s an abstract concept, no matter how much effort religious people put on personifying it. But our brains? Have we really started to worship a piece of flesh? Or by our brains we mean our minds and by our minds we mean the intelligence that pervades the universe? In that case, let’s not name the thing by its particular manifestation, but allow for intelligence elsewhere, in animals, plants and rocks, which are as amazing as Chopin playing the piano. I think the fact that a plant can live without eating is overly underestimated, but when some Indian man tries it, then we talk about miracles. The fact that a consciousness is born from two cells from different bodies is a miracle that many obviate. Many people argue in vitro, but let them find a cure for aging then. They can’t control life; they can merely supervise it.
I believe we can’t control in which body we’re born, but we do control our minds. A bump in the head may be quite a drastic way of awakening our minds, but it’s still us, integrally. Be it music, painting, languages, mathematics, every ability our minds hones will erupt in subsequent sparkles of consciousness we have, because we are meant to shine ever brighter.
