Science Makes You Stoical and Art makes You Crazy?

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Science and artistic fields may seem like oil and water. A balanced left and a right brain can dwell well in both. Steve Jobs is one of the offbeat, extraordinary examples of the left-right brain mix. A shrewd hippie, with a mind for tech, and a taste for aesthetics. Science demands logic. Creativity dwells on the magic you create with your imagination. People who choose science lead practical lives looking like an extension of humanoids. Doesn’t working with logic consistently make you impassive? But, we are human, aren’t we? We live for emotions. Those emotions reflect through family, friends, and people you love.

I think how practical can love get for these folks? They might simply work on parameters and checklists, isn’t it? when it comes to relations. The irony is, these are the kind of people who have stable relations and marriages, compared to the creative souls. Somewhere, deep down, when the practical mind is thinking well, realistically, it makes the other person’s life easy. Isn’t it? We, creative folks, live so deeply, intoxicating our minds with intensity, we give it a crown of madness and chaos, and call it free living. Doesn’t that completely defy the very meaning of free living?

Come to think of, creativity lies in science too. Music and art are made in numbers, format, and structure. Isn’t this the practical side of creativity? When designing smartphones, gadgets, the aesthetics are looked into. Now that, most certainly is the look and feel of a gizmo created with art in mind. So, what’s the facade about? What’s with the snobbery of science? We artists really have to learn to behave ourselves, and not be so open and expressive, expressing ourselves individualistically. But, that takes away the whole point of being a creative person. ‘Expressionism,’ the art of articulating yourself without the stain of pretense. Aren’t there more junkies in artistic fields, and it seems to be the norm? But, doesn’t art require balance too?

Madness and unruliness is not an excuse to be artistic. Likewise, being restrictive and reticent is not synonymous to science. Pragmatism is a feeling too, as long as it does not go to the extremes. It then becomes programmed and manufactured emotion, in its extremes. Sometimes, I feel, why these folks can’t feel so deeply. Because, when practical living seeps in, there is that uncompromising, self righteous, rigidity; and art is about flexibility. This goes to say, you can’t get into science without having a utility based thinking. You can’t get into art without being outrageous sometimes, you are allowed to be vile and offensive, if only there is a deep gumption that turfs out the vile and the sickening roots of conventional wisdom.

 

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