You Do Not Need to Understand Art to Feel It

Reading The Poetics of Space strikes me deeply.

Bachelard seems to understand the living energy of space — the metaphysics of space, energy itself — and it draws me toward what my own soul has been whispering all along: the journey Art + Being has ahead of it.

Which is simply this:

Art is a doorway through which we connect with our inner self, and with the different aspects we bury within.

Bachelard speaks of resonance.

Resonance is what happens when something in the work, the room, the image, the word, or the space strikes a chord in us. It echoes across different parts of our life — memory, feeling, imagination. It may awaken something joyful, something tender, or something long buried that is asking to be restored or recovered.

Then he speaks of reverberation, which is deeper.

It is when the encounter does not simply echo, but keeps sounding through us and begins to alter our inner being. It moves from response to transformation. Bachelard suggests that with resonance we hear the poem, the sound, the artwork — but with reverberation the work touches different aspects of us. Something reconnects, and our inner life deepens. He writes that resonance is dispersed across the different planes of our life, while reverberation invites us to give greater depth to our own existence. In reverberation, expression creates being.

And so, when I hear someone say:

“I feel intimidated by exhibitions.”
“I don’t know enough to appreciate art.”
“I don’t understand it.”

I want to say:

Listen.
Look.
Feel.

You do not need to understand art in order to feel it.

In fact, so often it is not the intellect that meets the work first.

It is something deeper.
Something more instinctive.
Something in us that recognises before the mind has found its language.

Because after all, what art touches are aspects of ourselves.

And when those parts reconnect, something opens.

We continue on our life path with a wider, larger, deeper perspective.

With every true look, with every real listening, we become a little more whole.

Feel it.
Listen to what arises.

There is no wrong.
There is no right.

It is you, after all.

And there is only one of you in this entire universe.

Isn’t that extraordinary?