More and more, I've begun to think that art, that all of the arts, are not necessarily mimesis, a representation of life, but extensions of life itself; not records of experience, but actual experience. Humans create art for the same reason that insects create hives, or birds create nests: it is a fundamental aspect of our nature, it is what we do.
People often dissect art in search of meaning, in search of instruction; when they find (or believe they find) this meaning, they use it to squeeze the dissected art into categories (horror, drama, romance, science fiction) in the same way that people stuff old shirts and jeans into boxes, and then press down on the lids of these bulging boxes to tape them shut. Yet by doing this, they shift their attention away from art itself to their ideas about art. For the sake of distraction, they ignore what really matters: the experience of art, in all of its troubling complexity, ambiguity, and living refusal to be paraphrased, explained, labelled, and forgotten.
(Many of these ideas came to me as I struggled with the stories and poems of Walter de la Mare, a writer who refuses categorization, who slips away from explanation.)
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