Art is the axe for the frozen sea within

Perhaps, but it's important to find the right axe for your particular sea. Otherwise you'll waste time trying to cut through fathoms of ice with a plastic toy axe instead of the high-speed drilling equipment you need.

The choice ought to be influenced most by what you do with the rest of your life. If you're anal retentive, pedantic arts like calligraphy aren't going to hack it, so to speak. Likewise, a free spirit isn't going to get too much mileage out of abstract splatter painting.

It's all about trying to get to the inside of your mind from a different direction, where the defenses aren't built up so high, and releasing the creativity within.

Find your axe, and start hacking.

The title of this node, "art is the axe for the frozen sea within us" is, I believe, an attempt to represent a sentence originally written by Franz Kafka. The actual text of Kafka's sentence refers to books, and not to art in general. The quote, in translation, is this:

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

The sentence was written by Kafka in an epistle to Oskar Pollak dated January 27th, 1904. The phrase has been quoted by a variety of authors from a variety of disciplines. Perhaps most famous is the quote by Anne Sexton on page 48 of The Complete Poems, from her 1962 collection All My Pretty Ones. It is also quoted by Cherrie Moraga at page 174 of her Loving in the War Years. The famous French feminist Helene Cixous makes use of this quote on page 17 of her beautiful Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing as well as in other places in her texts. Here is the complete text from Kafka's letter:

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it ? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we loved ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."

Agreed, except for the part about choosing your Art based on your hobbies, be they big or small. You can choose to read more if you're into reading, or become more into a field of Art that you generally have a better time interpreting, but when it comes to the specifics, I think Art chooses you.

Personally, I don't care *what* the Art evokes for me; I judge it by its power. I LOVE a painting that leaves me in jaw-hanging awe, be it cubist or abstract or surrealist or shit flung on canvas. Let's just say, whatever my ice, I'm going to grab the most whup-ass axe I see.

Are you sure you want to hack away at that frozen sea? What is on the other side of it? Are you sure you want to meet it? And if there is, in the end, nothing there is that something that you are ready to deal with?

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Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

What would you say, if your words could become trumpets?
and what would you write, if your sentences became a Statue?
Tell me about your painting, if it became a forest
Show me your music, if it were to fly away like a flock of birds
What would your dance look like if flowed into a river -
How would your film look if it was a sky of clouds?
Gestures, sounds, shapes, colors, edges and textures
Where would they run if they had open fields-
where would they fly if they had wings?

Breathe your life into them -stand back, and watch.