Ceasing to be Human Artists: Becoming Animal and Plant -Artists

Poetry fails, art fails, dance fails and music fails. When all these fail human beings fail for they are the makers of all those art forms. Once they fail to create them out of fear, out of lethargy and out of a sense of uselessness the world becomes two dimensional. Human beings slowly turn into animals, mute, obedient and remote. They move away from the mainstream society which is formed by a group of people who have lost their art and sensitivity for art. Their failure lies in their inability to see those people who make art and listen to the silent clues that these art forms give. They even have not noticed that the artists, poets, dancers and musicians, and all other creative people have gone away from the crowds. They have gone somewhere else. They have gone to become animals.

Animals, birds and creatures are pure beings. So are the plants. The former ones move and the latter one stay. Whether they move or stay, they teach us a way of living; living without hurting others. Animals do not predate if they are not hungry. They do not hunt for fun. Plants live on inflicting least hurt to others. Both animals and trees intermingle in a beautiful heaven of co-existence. Human beings are also animals; they move and the only problem is that they think. The more they think the more they think about their own well being. So they hunt and they hunt to eat and hunt for fun too. Artists are animals by nature. But slowly they also changed their nature. They became human beings who hunt for fun. 

Artists who want to retain their animal nature somehow have become plants to day. They live silently, drinking sunlight and leaving out the best of things possible for the survival of other beings. They tend not to hurt anything around. Plants that grow in home gardens are not real plants; they live there because they do not want to hurt the people who have brought them there. Those are happy plants that live here and there without any order but keeping an internal rhythm with the nature. Plants and trees that are tended in the nurseries are not real plants yet they are there because they do not have the ability to walk off. They look at the trees around and keep on talking to them. As they do not move, they remain constant companions until they are taken away in cars to the floors that move towards heaven and away from earth.

Animal-artists are the plant artists. They walk silently with a sketch pad, a note book and a flute along the paths the mainstream people have grown tired. The mainstream people have gone to the six lane asphalt roads where carnivals take place, in the night clubs where loud noise, meaningless words, wild gyrations and psychedelic lights make them weirder than they have entered earlier. Animal-artists who have by now become plant natured sit under trees, take out their sketchbooks and draw; poets sit by the side of the river and write, musicians walk into the dark forests and play flutes for the beasts that hide inside, dancers move along the seashores, watching sunsets and sunrises.

Good artists are animals and plants. We have a lot to learn from them. We have to become them. We have to become the other so that the othering process would stop at some point. When everyone tries to become an other, a beast or a plant then there will not be persons with religious identities. When the need to gather diminishes, the need to emphasise identity also recedes. Animals do not tell their names or flaunt their religions, nor do the plants because they do not have banks and profits. They do not run businesses and invest in stock markets. They do not participate in auctions either. They do not sell their ninety per cent of the stocks to foreigners and retain ten percent and still control the aesthetics of a country. Animals do not run galleries. Plants do not collect paintings. But they adore each other. They drink from the same stream and never pollute it before they leave. So it is pertinent to become animal-artists and plant-artists, and go and live in forests and deserted places. To be a mainstream human being is Hell.