How Art Makes Life Bearable, excerpt from Divine Remembering micheldemetriatsouris2.blogspot.com

HOW ART MAKES LIFE BEARABLE

In the broadest scheme of things, they say that history continues to repeat itself.

But that was not what Kosta believed. The way our cousin Kosta saw it, nothing stayed the same. Transformation was the breath we took in and the one we exhaled. And for him every act of art was an act of transformation. Alchemical, the mark of the painter, its interpretation forever changing as each new viewer sets eyes upon it. Same for the writer, the poet, the musician, their work sets in motion proof of our true nature. Paintings can never be a document of the past, they are an ever-transfiguring organic statement, they point to the infinite nature of nature. Change is our nature. History is a false document of fragile and fearful memories. History was a weaving together of what you wanted to remember and what you wanted to forget until the two were indecipherable and no one could really hold you to the facts. “Memory is infinitely transient,” he said. Change and this very moment was what Kosta came to revere. He believed: not the blurred past; not the future; neither the hopeful nor the feared future; only in the here and the now and the changing.

When he wrote he made sure to tell us, the illusions are powerful, the redemption from them more so. “Rise above it all, because you are all already there.”

“Looking back," he often reminded me, “is in some ways an empty gesture. Look out from where you are right now, then you’ll see.”

The losses, the disappearances, the wars, the resentments, the explosions, the moments lacking in compassion, they are not here now. “Right now, child, we have everything we need. Nothing has been lost, no one has left for forever, this is a sphere that cannot be broken. Do you understand?”

I ask myself, do I? Do I understand?

“Deja Vu,” for example, “what do you think that is?” “It is you returning to what you already knew what you already will know, what you never left behind, because there is no behind, no before, no after, just right now. What you think of as the past or the future, it is all right here.”

“Cousin,” I tell him “in moments what you say is perfectly clear, in others perfectly obscure. “

“For me too, honey. I just have more practice trying it on for size."

excerpt from Divine Remembering    Michel Demetria Tsouris 2014
The book can be found at  micheldemetriatsouris2.blogspot.com