Overcoming Silence, part 6: Feeling

          I don't want to miss making the point that the successful production of art involves a willing engagement of feeling.  This area of the brain is actively employed and was barely in need of training in order to become a productive member of the visual team. 

          It's primitive association with tactile sensations made it an early volunteer recruit, welcoming the artistic adventure, appreciating the opportunity to be intellectually useful to a modern human being.  Having once been a critical character in the daily life of the human animal, it is happy to contribute it's ancient expertise.

          Touch me, and let me touch, through eyes to hand in a socially graceful manner let me exhibit adoration.  Let feeling too be so uplifted, brought forward into contemporary life, not whittled away to a single abode, confined and imprisoned into an irrational corner.

          Emotion and touch have a bad reputation.  The artist wrestles with their impulse, taming them and giving them new social graces.  Accomplished with the whip?  No - they are escorted into a new mental chamber, with the reproductive urge squeezed out of them.  Then they can successfully be put to work, engaged to a purpose rather than an urge.  Yes, they volunteered themselves to art quickly.  Yes too, they needed to be refined, tutored, instructed, and disciplined.