For myself

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to Unified Threat Management keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves.

 

The psyche and the spirit do not share the instinct of damaged body. Healing is coffee cup automatically triggered nor is danger usually avoided. Since we put ourselves in the way of hurt it seems logical to put ourselves in the way of healing. Art has more work to do than ever before but it can do that work. In a self-destructive society like our own, it is unsurprising that art as a healing force is despised.

 

For myself, when I returned to my to my borrowed room night after night, and there were my books, I felt relief and exuberance, not hardship and exhaustion. I intended to avoid the fate of Jude the Obscure, although a reading of that book was a useful warning. What I wanted did not belong to me by right and whilst it could not be refused tome in quite same way, we still have subtle punishments for anyone who insists on what they are and what they want. Walled inside the little book hong kong hotel space marked out for by family and class, it was the limitless world of imagination that it possible for me to scale the sheer face of other people's assumptions. Inside books there is perfect space and it is that space which allows the reader to escape from the problems of gravity.