There is but one singular purpose for the artist, and that’s to purify their art to one ode, one rhythm, one harmony, one line of prose, one sentence. To the magic elixir of our art, the final opus, as clean and pure as it can be.
I don’t think you’re an artist if through all your work, all your searching, all the things you produce, you aren’t driven by the chase of finding that one thing that exemplifies everything you’re trying to achieve.
This extends into the scientific world as well, perhaps even more-so, for what is science if it is driven only by a robotic, lifeless and mostly monetised objective, by a narrative enslaved to restricted paradigms and formulae, how impure a pursuit is science if the scientist isn’t driven by a romantic ideal of discovery and rewriting otherwise dogmatic beliefs? The purity under their microscope, the precision of the one cut of the scalpel, all of it, driven madly by purity of pursuit.
The silver lining is the purpose, as minimal as possible, untainted.
This chase, this desire is but a longing for our origin. We were born pure, and we spend our lives chasing it. Chasing down the reminder of what we once were.
In our innermost core, we’re utterly and magnetically attracted to it. We linger, we pang, we ache, we feign for it.
The addiction can be so overwhelming that we lose our way, much like a madman searching through the forest looking down for their treasure for so long that when they look up, the world seems so disoriented and your location in it all is unknown.
Some people pop, they have enough and cannot contain themselves, either their outer appearance changes to resemble that of a derelict, for what is a homeless person except someone without a place to return to for safeguarding from the elements? Nay, perhaps those people become the elements.
They’ve lost their home or way back to it that they become the elements they’re surrounded by, is it with this subconscious thought that we so numbingly ignore them as we walk past, they, vanish into the environment, into their surroundings?
That’s not how we understand the outer appearance to resemble, and so we label them mad, homeless, worthless because we attach worth to orientation, to a direction, to a purpose. What if their purpose all along was finding that purity and in the method, have become the purity, outward semblance like thorns on a rose, unkempt to keep people away, so they can guard their secret.
The secret in the Sufi path was never to look down on a vagabond, a darwish, a person humbled before God.
It was to treat the faqir, the spiritually impoverished, sometimes appearing as the materially impoverished with the same dignity owed to a sultan.
And so we return to the artist engrossed in their search for purity, perhaps by God’s bounty and generosity He allows beauty or remnants of it to extend to all humanity through their fingers, through their states as a sign for us to be reminded of our purity, without losing our minds.
Perhaps by His largesse He grants the artist temporary sanity to pursue their goal or at least enjoy the process whilst they are alive.
Wesam El dahabi
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