Metonymy, Taishun

"I know what to do with the play now.I have an idea. I think if everyone--"

So I used to date this girl who's a painter. 

Now, you know what people always say. "Don't get too involved with artists. Finally they are just unbearable" or "The more beautiful their art is the messier they will be"--those are kind of the phrases. But you know what's interesting? In my case, certainly the gap is there--I mean, that supposedly irredeemable gap between art and life--but somehow I just enjoyed it. I really did! I mean, Dog, how I loved to watch her struggle with pieces and pieces of paper torn from her scrapbooks, getting the room all dirty and herself all moody just to get the touch of a stroke right. . . And the point is--despite all this messiness and awkwardness during the process--at the end of the day, it still did not prevent me from admiring her works or being touched by them, y'know? In fact, not only wasn't the charm--this "aura" or "mana" as they call it--diminished in the slightest from her final pieces, but, on the contrary, I've always felt that something more--something magic even--was being added up to them and that, exactly because I was there in almost every aspect of her life, this something belonged to me alone, y'know? It's like, among the seven billion people in this crazy world of ours, I am the only one who actually witnesses her secret mutation from the scruffiest to the purest, from the most quotidian of life to the most earth-shattering of art, y'know?

And finally I remember thinking to myself that, perhaps, that's the point of art, and perhaps that's why we cannot but keep creating it. It's not life itself--it can never be life itself, it always falls short--yet neither is it simply not life. Rather, I'd imagine what matters is this infinitely close yet minutely distant connection we create between art and life, see? It makes you think. It gives you an idea of man's potentiality and transformation. 

It's this very gap between "the chaos of life" and "the beauty of art" that shows us what, as finite human beings, we aspire and are capable of.