The Train of Recital

People from different fields of study always have this subtle tug of war between them, trying to prove one field of study to be superior to the other. Most artists believe that art is the ultimate fabric connecting everything giving it meaning and beauty whereas most scientists believe in the more logical and deductive explanations of this fabric of reality. There is this constant smirk battle between the nihilists and the existentialists, rationalists and the empiricist, the realists and the idealist, mathematicians and physicists, defining everything just in black and white. Then  there was me as a kid watching this constant division silently and enjoying my little grey space. I never really felt like I belonged to any particular team; I loved them all. I loved the stories of great men and women as much as learning about the physics of light. I adored knowing about the geographical aspects of culture and food as well as a good inspiring poetry. I was amazed by learning about the Fibonacci series that is responsible for the patterns in flowers and pines as also by the sheer beauty of that same flower being painted differently by different people. There was this divide none the less and I later realized that people who studied about various topics and inculcated them into their work were termed “polymaths” and people who had in depth knowledge about a particular subject were termed “specialists” both of which are necessary for this society to function. This blog will be like a train journey stopping at stations of culture and food, of poetry and numbers, of people and planets, of beauty and history, of books and love but most importantly of all the things that made me wonder. It will be the recital of how art meets science and the people who created a spectrum of nuanced possibilities just by exploring that little grey space.

The term “renaissance” literally means to be “reborn” and marked the rebirth of European arts, sciences and literature which originated in Florence, Italy and then spread to Europe between the 14th-17th century. I remember as a kid when we had a lesson on renaissance in our history textbooks, I stumbled upon this name, a person who was a painter, an inventor, an astronomer, a biologist, cartographer and even a paleontologist. It made me wonder how can a man possibly have such extensive knowledge about all of these seemingly polar opposite fields of study. He was none other than Leonardo Da Vinci. I read obsessively about him and what astounded me apart from the insane fan following and conspiracies surrounding him was the fact that this exceptional painter was also the person who studied and contributed to biomechanics by studying muscles and tendons and it’s anatomy, and also the person who first illustrated a fetus in a uterus. He was also the person who lay the foundation for early paleontology because of his fossil studies and the same person who had hundreds of inventions; some of which were successful ranging from crank mechanisms, hydraulic pumps to even parachutes and some other flying machines. It was not just him but many individuals that were intellectually much superior because almost all the renaissance men and women blurred the line between the arts and sciences. It was a continuous process of learning and letting go and learning something new again. Of course, in the modern lingo, a renaissance person is considered to be a polymath or someone with areas of multiple interests. It is only later on did I realize that polymaths exist between us as well and not just the renaissance period, only today, we have constrained them into these boxes with different subjects and specialties.

All problems, be it in medicine, engineering, or even fashion designing need a specialist in that field to tackle it but we forget that problems itself are multi faceted and it is the polymaths that connect these dots and make them dance together. Science is considered to be objective and art to be subjective but neither of them are fixed on the extreme end of this spectrum and a polymath weds them off in a way that we never would have perceived. Pablo Picasso said, “All children are born artists, the problem is to remain one as we grow up” but all children are also born scientists with curiosity and a drive to experiment everyday things in life. Some do incline to one more than the other but are never exclusively on one team while some are stuck trying to be inclined to one while in reality all they want to do is to jump all around the place exploring and following the path that their interests take them. Even though the system today is designed primarily for specialists, it did not stop Benjamin Franklin from dabbling into politics, writing about political philosophies and inventing bifocals and lightening rods at the same time.; neither did it stop him from inventing the glass harmonica (on which both Mozart and Beethoven have composed music) and studying about oceanic current, population studies to quench his thirst for curiosity. “Jack of all trades and master of none” we have all heard this quote at least once in our lifetime and while we just assumed this quote to be true, we were ignorant to the tricks it played with our mind. It made us believe that perfection is all that we need to achieve; striving to become a master, a specialist, a legend. While it holds true for some professions, we all just walk over the fact that not all of us are wired that way and that is not a negative quality. It was maybe this realization that Rabindranath Tagore had which gave birth to “Shantiniketan” , a school that nursed the freedom of human curiosity, that did not alienate the human mind to the beauty of knowledge by caging it into four walls. Here students were encouraged to follow the life cycles of plants and insects and create art at the same time. We still have a long way to go to make changes as transforming as these but hopefully we will reach there someday.

Steve Jobs said, “Technology alone is not enough. It is technology married with liberal arts and humanities that make our heart sing.” and by similar logic art in itself is not enough. Sigmund Freud, a neurologist who is considered to be the founder of psychoanalysis or therapy using counselling; in the process of studying and providing science (however controversial) made art in disguise. His study which tackled the sub-conscious mind was actually describing “feelings” and “emotions” which  find their cradle in arts. The famous Van Gogh and his starry night wouldn’t have been considered a work of sheer genius hadn’t it been for his accurate representation of the turbulence of air flow which is a pretty complicated area of study let alone representation; neither would Da Vinci be so well known if there wasn’t mathematics (golden ratio) underlying in all of his paintings. Arts has science to realize it’s beauty and science has arts as the motivation and reason for it to thrive.

In this whole internet banter of  “I was forced to take engineering. This is so lame” or “Art has no real value” or even “This is not my true calling” we refuse to believe that all of them can somehow co-exist together. We are allowed to have multiple “true callings”. Between the fight of trying to prove ourselves to either be a left or right brained person, we forget that it is in fact the same brain and has the same activity and communication of both parts to function together; like a team, be it a scientist or an artist. Genetic and environmental factors do influence our likes and dislikes or even our aptitude but the division today is because of the years of conditioning that we have gone through not realizing that our mind has a potential we haven’t unleashed yet. So this blog will exactly be about all of these interceptions that we fail to observe and the people doing it exceptionally well in the modern era. So board this train with me and between the choo-choo of the engine and the rattling of the rails all of the stories, wonders and inspirations will travel and flourish.