What is generally called art consists of the more or less talented representation of subjective problems: I love Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Proust, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t great neurotics. Great geniuses and great neurotics! As for me, I have always searched for the truth. From the beginning I believed that it was expressed through words; then little by little as I progressed, I realized that I had to cross a frontier, make the extreme sacrifice of articulated language in order to enter the unthinkable. Because the truth is unthinkable. It can be sensed, but one cannot think it. Poetry, art, and beauty lead us to the edges of this unthinkable. Beauty, in a way, is the aura of truth. One cannot see truth, but beauty is visible. The artist’s role, therefore, in my view, is to make beauty visible as a reflection of truth. Now beauty assumes that one is recovering from illness; it comes about through healing. Outside of healing it is not real beauty. A viper is beautiful, but its beauty is deceptive because it poisons you. Certain aspects of illness can even fascinate us and therefore appear beautiful to us. Nevertheless, the beauty that heals must be distinguished from the beauty that kills.
SACRED TRICKERY AND THE WAY OF KINDNESS. THE RADICAL WISDOM OF JODO (2016)
