We can sustain the ancient cult of the dead by allowing the deceased to live in our memory. In ancient Greece, a deceased person's body was respected to prevent their soul from haunting the world of the living (Agamben, 2002:80). The dead ancestors are honored with mighty funerals and food offerings for a deceased person. But those whose rights have not been served and have not been mourned become a "ghost." (Derrida, 2006: 23) Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the ability of people to carry death within themselves. He states that "we each carry our death inside us as the fruit has its core…a dignified, befitting and humane death",; but the death of victims is a disappearance. (Rilke, 2012: 73). For example, Rilke lived like a poem and died like a poem after being pricked by a rose thorn.
Martin Heidegger knows that the "forgetting of death" is the main crisis of his age. * Citation needed. People have been denied the right to die, and wars, genocides, conflicts, and protests have displaced them. Art undertakes the crisis of transfer and turns memory, through consciousness, into an apparition or ghost. We remember that William Shakespeare's Hamlet spoke to a spirit when he declared, "the time is out of joint."
Edvard Munch's The Scream has been the voice of the existential suffering of humans. The figure, standing on a bridge under a yellow, orange, and red sky, with his hands raised to his face and with a look of terror in his eyes, appears to scream at the top of his lungs. Munch says, "...as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on. I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I felt a vast infinite scream tear through nature." (Munch, 2005)
Artists listen to their inner voices when they create art, even when the screams of victims are their inner voices. To illuminate justice, artists hear the imaginary voices of those who have died and have not yet been born: the victims of politics, nationalism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, sexism, totalitarianism, wars, and massacres. These sounds or screams are what artists call inspiration.
Artists hear the screams of those who are silenced, read their ghost language well, and help us listen to it by transforming it into an aesthetic language. While speaking of life and death, Adorno interprets the language of expression as a distinctive and sensual form of the soul. (Derrida, 1994: 23). Derrida stated that we would have to learn about spirits. But how? Learning to live would amount to learning to live together with ghosts on the border.
While artists need to complete a dream and reach the limit of wakefulness to define, interpret and resolve, we need to contact the boundary of death to learn about life. This limit allows us to describe a dream before waking up.
According to Adorno, even if Auschwitz survivors live fake lives deprived of their liberties, they are trapped between life and death. The fact that they live knowing that fear is worse than death does not make them different from the dead. When life is reified, compassion is reduced and becomes a selfish motive of self-defense (Adorno, 2006: 299). This is harmony with no solidarity, and a state of senselessness, social cohesiveness developed by force. Adorno's "reified consciousness" does not only refer to those "that cannot be directly actualized" but to those "that live on merely as thought and recollection."
Goya's painting Sad Presentiments of What Must Come To Pass makes us feel the oncoming agony that will cause harm or even death. The dark figure kneels with his hands open before the coming suffering and surrenders helplessly.
Goya's The Third of May 1808 witnesses a bloody murder on a night: civilians being massacred by rows of French soldiers, a pile of dead bodies lying on the ground, and others witnessing the atrocity and awaiting their turn to be murdered. Thanks to Goya's remarkable observational power, the painting establishes a profound relationship with the ongoing wars, massacres, violence, and uprooted people. Somewhere, sometimes, something has gone away, but there is no story or memory left of it (Butler, 2005: 8). It is a moment when only the artist can immortalize the screams of victims.
If artists who stand on the line that separates life from death, and dreams from wakefulness, can speak of the completeness of life, then they too must be ghosts. However, Derrida, who reminded us that ghosts do not exist, said that artists assumed the role of spirits and were the border guards who let us know about ghosts.
Vision Particuliere
In broad terms, art allows us to cross the boundaries of the world of matter and construct new universes. Art allows us to go beyond our petty or monumental concerns of everyday life and ordinary reality and relieves the burden of large masses. It draws us to the depths of our structure and leads us to our cores. Art deepens our perception of existence and shelters us. Ernest Fisher once said that art is magic that embraces us like an unrestricted and dimensionless shelter of dreams.
Art allows us to reconstruct the perceptions of imagination and the experiences necessary to make tomorrow possible. Art is a therapeutic means of unearthing the elements that people push into their subconscious.
The tragedy on which art is based takes form by striving to make sense of, hear and design life through love, curiosity, and quest central to real life. The alternative reality constructed via personal symbolism is used to create art.
For example, in his magnificent solitude, Van Gogh painted at the cost of facing the scorching sunlight. He painted by altering the world that he perceived. He painted the shining stars and the rotating lights of the night in a way that no one could see. He stared at a truth that no one ever saw until it blinded him. He reached a completely different truth with his eyes and died, leaving revolutionary works of art behind.
Living alone in America, Edgar Allen Poe moved his intelligence backward and forwards and told us about the universe from his lonely world of which others were unaware.Since the beginning of history, human beings have wanted to overcome and change the existing order of life. Just like the "desire to rise," in the most ancient belief systems and in today's scientific and technological quests, art makes that rising possible by illuminating our personality.
An artist is a person with a concern and a design. An artist sees and hears herself, her environment, and present and future events from the angle illuminated by her existence, and she redesigns them. The common feature of all artists who have moved "beyond the ordinary" is that they raise their voices in the face of a mediocre sense of hearing.
Vision particuliere, the cornerstone of Kafka, is a distinct form of vision. Those who have never dreamed cannot describe it. An artist who has emancipated herself from the ordinary and tradition might one morning wake up to find herself speaking a foreign language in a foreign country among foreign people. The more the artist can face this predicament, the braver she is.
Through the genius of artists such as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goethe, and Racine; like the wise but grief-stricken Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire rediscovers his helplessness. Like Arthur Rimbaud, his sparkle; Franz Kafka encounters the world of dead ends and Pablo Picasso rediscovers an order of things. They grasped life through the colors of their being and focused on their own spiritual states of mind. Like Gerard de Nerval, an artist chases her other self while escaping from herself. The dead engaged with life, an awake dream, are ghosts and selves ready to change at any moment.
Making art is the desire to experience an awake dream and a space where we feel safe in our subconscious when life falls away from the lines of justice and meaning. Freud interprets the fantasies and dreams of unhappy people as the desire to correct unsatisfactory reality.
Emotions evoked in the real universe emerge while they rise to the language level through symbols. Symbols, like dreams that cannot be understood, sometimes cannot be logically described. As in the grotesque, the artist is strange, contradictory, insensitive, cold, and closed to any connections with readers. She leads to the emergence of irony in contrast between the tragic and the funny, the beautiful and the ugly.
In this relationship, the artist rids herself of the ebb and flow between reality and fiction and discerns the metaphysical world. She reflects on the relationship that the subconscious mind establishes with dreams.
Our subconscious perceives, organizes, encodes, and stores everything that is seen, heard, thought, and felt, allowing the past to reproduce itself in the "now."
The recent union of art, science, and technology has enabled us to understand even the most ancient and mythological eras. Reproducing and constructing fiction has allowed us to go to the depths of memory and to the origins of humanity, where information in our subconscious and collective memory is stored. It has also animated more vividly the memories it has witnessed on earth and, thus, shed light on our future.