Isolation and travel. Coming from work Friday night and not seeing anyone until Monday morning. Just music, literature and film. Silence. Long hours of no voices except those of the artist.

 What is it that so validates the work of artists? What value does it add to our life? Some very successful music books films obviously contribute to the economy, profit their publishers greatly, hence the high rewards for their creators. But that’s really a secondary consequence of the art. What is it really that music literature paintings etc give us?What makes us go to their concerts or plays, shelve their dog-eared and underlined books for years so we can return to our favourite parts, stand in front of their paintings in far-away galleries, sit mesmerised by their films and collect them on dvd to watch regularly from year to year? To read their lines and think inside “fuck me I have to tell someone about this one!” What does it really add to your life? Nothing profitable really, to be honest. You can live a life complete without ever enjoying any of it and still die satisfied with what you gave or what you saved.

 So why bother? Because good art reaches deep down. Like a red hot forged sword through the butter of our psyche, our soul, it cuts down past the daily to and fro, the animal competition of society’s games, to pluck the deep chords, to pound the inner drum, and make our deep down collective spirit dance. It makes us feel human, when everything around pushes us to feel only animal. It takes us above the hand to mouth survival, above the animal needs of food and shelter, salaries and property prices, that so many only focus on. And some people dont even know that’s why they love it, they dont need to acknowledge it, they just feel it.

 It’s the real work. Work that belittles corporate half-yearly profit announcements as shadowy juveniles in uniform, chimps bearing their teeth. Work that silences the newsreaders and politicians, blah blah and blah. Work that turns your back on the sandpit bullying of the city rats and the idols they swarm at the feet of.

 Down, down deep in to climb the real mountains, paddle jungle-humming crystal streams, and trek the wild escarpment at the edge of that indescribable inner ocean we know is always raging in there. A sea of cool fire that we all once crawled out of.

 Because bookshops – new and secondhand, cd/dvd shops, cinemas and theatres, and especially libraries are gateways to tens of thoasands of roads, avenues, crooked alleys, superhighways and overgrown forest paths along which you can reach some place you’ve never been, and yes you can tap in to that eternal river of experience flowing way down inside of all of us, or atleast have a good journey along the way. They are the jumping off points to adventure, the dimly lit sea port inns, the airports with infinite lists of departures where possibly only yourself will be stretched out on the flight to the experience of your life.

 And that’s it. Because in the end all we have is experience, the senses, perceived, felt and recorded. Don’t kid yourself that it has to be physical to be valid. Some of the most jaded thoroughly world-travelled backpackers will not have traversed with their heart and mind the peaks and valleys that one sitting with headphones listening to their favourite music or following line by line the steeped verses of some 18th Century poet can potentially voyage across.

Prove that I’m wrong. Argue then that the human mind isn’t the most unchartered mysterious region of expanse available to everyone, and those artists that map their own interiors with words, music and image aren’t the greatest of explorers. Argue for the finite over the infinite.