I was walking one day through the misty shadows of my life wondering about the why of my world, the why of my work and thinking I should be more useful.  Useful like a train engine able to drag and to push, to travel great distances or only move other cars around a yard.  Useful like a cast iron skillet able to fry chicken to crispy perfection or fend off an intruder with its heavy black purpose.

By that definition usefulness is able to transform, to move, to change one thing into another in a noticeable way.  And so, isn’t that what art does?  Doesn’t art move us, transform us, change us in some unknowable way?  In the soul, the heart, the mind we are changed by the art that speaks to us, and that art can only come from the soul, the heart the mind of another for whom these same images, thoughts, dreams, longings carry great power.  That’s useful then, isn’t it?

Not useful like a ladle, perhaps, or a garden hoe or one of those gigantic cranes that reach into the sky to build yet another warren of living spaces, but necessary.  For without art, without that expression of the human soul, that connection across miles, across centuries, across chasms of experience, of heartache, of pain how would any one of us “know” the other?

Through art we find solace for the aches, the ideas, the dreams that alternately trouble and excite our minds.  We see them reflected by the great artists of the world and know we are not alone.  To know art, to create art, to appreciate art is to be human, is to fully embrace this human life and hold it dear, if only for a moment, and that is indeed useful.

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Jessica Ciosek’s work appears in the “Mothers” issue of Minerva Rising.