Is It Possible To Say Nothing? by Nikhil Sharda

Well, take a writer, for example. His medium is words. Now, words have meanings and, with those meanings, emotional associations. Despite all cynical doubts, it is very difficult for a writer not to say something whenever he assembles his words, and he likewise cannot avoid stirring in some measure the emotions of his readers. But so far as he does these things, he is intimately bound to life and to the world around him. He could be completely detached only if he treated words as sounds which have no sense, and this he would have to do in such a way as not to suggest any meaning through the very absence of it. This technique has been attempted by Miss Gertrude Stein, but it cannot be said to have caught on.

The painter has a wider area in which to practice detachment. He does not have to represent on canvas the forms and movements of ordinary life. He may, if he likes, paint “non -objectively”; that is to say, he can assemble colours into patterns of his own choosing without any resemblance to objects as they are seen. There can be no objections to this procedure so long as it remains one among many possible choices for painters to make; we do not require literal representation upon rugs or drapery, and there seems to be no reason why we should specifically require it for painting. Yet, even here, if complete detachment were to be attained, the painter would have to annul any possible suggestion which might lie in the painting’s emotional appeal. Kandinsky, for example, copies nothing; but the magnificence of his composition suggests harmony and movement, which in turn can suggest other concepts to the very boundary of an observer’s thought.

The composer seems at first sight, more detached from life than any other artist. Unlike the writer, he actually does deal with sounds that have no fixed meanings. Yet he is bound to life by emotional association fully as much as writers are. No one can take Tchaikovsky to have been an optimist; no one can imagine Beethoven to have been a man of small ideas. For his part, the old giant still maintained that in every work he expressed some portion of his philosophy. The apparent meaninglessness of musical composition is in fact an invitation to listeners to supply it with meanings as their minds roam free. Probably the only way to cancel all possible meanings would be to make the work so dull as to be no invitation.

It seems unlikely, then, that there can be many works of art which have no reference to life and the problems of living. For most artists it must remain inseparably difficult to negate the very humanity which is the source of their own skills. Try as one may to empty art of content, there will remain some hint, some whisper, which shall set in motion the minds of other men.