SUBSTACK SHARE…
when it is dark, the world calls to its artists
on the necessity of science, and the salvation of art
they’ll tell you that the arts aren’t practical. that literature is a luxury. that philosophy is indulgent. they’ll say history repeats because it has no utility, that music is background noise, that poetry is frivolous. and then, someone dies, and they recite a verse. someone marries, and they read neruda. someone grieves, and they hum a song their mother once sang. suddenly, it’s the impractical things that become necessary. suddenly, art is not a luxury, it’s the language of being alive. they denounce us, then they go back to their lives artists have coloured. colour with the song they cry to, the book lying dog-eared and annotated beside the lamp, the show they flit back to on the bad days. when the world’s cruelty shows its claws, they return to us. they return to that song, that show, that book. they want the art without its artists, these fools with hearts that pump blood and bleed love.
science teaches us how to survive. how the body moves, how the brain fires, how stars collapse and seeds grow and time stretches across galaxies. but the humanities teach us why we bother. why a mother still sings lullabies even when she’s tired. why we name the constellations. why we keep old letters in drawers we rarely open. why we break and still choose to love again. science is a necessity, it sustains and engineers survival– but arts let you live. not just eat, breathe and sleep but find beauty. find meaning. feel love, feel the shit that lets you live. science builds the alarm to wake you, arts asks why you must. science warms the food, arts make it a meal. science is the fact of creation while art is the beauty of it.
art is not separate from science, it breathes inside it. the first cave paintings were biology and belief fused together. every violin string plucked is physics meeting emotion. every novel is neuroscience unfolding in metaphor. our heartbeat is not just a muscle contracting; it is rhythm. our thoughts are not just data; they are narrative. we are built of atoms, yes, but we are also built of stories.
we are memory before we are fact. before we are names on government papers or records in hospital files, we are remembered, by how we made someone laugh, by the way our eyes softened at certain songs, by the things we whispered when we thought no one was listening. and that is the domain of the humanities. of art. of story. to hold the unquantifiable parts of being human, to name the ache that science can measure but not mend.
no formula can explain the way grief sounds when it enters a room. no theorem accounts for the pause in a sentence when someone realises they’re being truly seen. there is no graph that charts how love lingers in old sweaters or the outline of a shadow on a bedroom wall. but poetry knows. music knows. literature has known for centuries. paintings scream it in silence. cinema wraps it in light.
there is no evolution to grief and love. when the mother holds the calf’s carcass, carrying it till it rots into the soil– it does so because no biology could pin down the heart’s strings. when the shoulder aches because it has been an hour yet you move not a muscle so you can watch them sleep till the end of time, what rationale does it carry? we are creatures of love, of art– the world would be ending and you’ll be looking to kiss them just that one last time. covered in ash like the lovers of pompeii, when death looks in your eyes– you look back at theirs and all is well one final time.
science makes you build the bomb, but humanity stops the explosion. the cold, hard things we build– what do we do without the softness of humanities? without its ethics, without it holding us to the thread of love.
and still, people will ask what’s the point of it all? why study something that doesn’t “advance” the world? but the world doesn’t advance on survival alone. it advances on meaning. on compassion. on questions we’re not meant to answer but must learn how to live with. what happens after death? why do we fear loneliness? what does it mean to be free? to be seen? to be remembered? it is the humanities that dare to ask. that dare to stay with the ache instead of running from it. when frankenstein played god, he forgot that creation cannot be abandoned. science bought the creation, but frankenstein made it a monster. if it had been listened to, if it had been shown kindness, if it had shown humanity– how different the story would be. we study humanities so we don’t make monsters of men. so they know to look beyond creation, to look at the burden it comes with. to look at something and see that the soul carries us as much evolution does.
science may cure disease, but it is art that teaches us how to live while we’re sick. science may help us reach the stars, but it is art that reminds us why we looked up in the first place.
art is the first thing we turn to when words fail us and the last thing we hold onto when everything else is taken. when disaster strikes, we do not reach for equations – we reach for metaphors. when we fall in love, we do not calculate it, we write sonnets. when someone we love dies, we play their favorite song on loop until the silence feels less cruel. that is not indulgence. that is survival by soul. and it matters.
because what are we, if not the sum of our stories? not just the ones we tell the world, but the ones we whisper to ourselves when no one’s watching. stories that hold our shame, our wonder, our wanting. stories that teach us how to begin again, even after the end. art holds that beginning. it carries it across centuries, in brushstrokes and verses and footnotes scribbled in the margins of time.
when civilisations end, each one convinced it is immortal– all that remains is the little things. the supposedly unimportant tasks we never think much of. all that remains is the clay toys a kid grew up with. the tablet inscribed with a lover’s sonnet, the intertwined bones of mother and child. the common man’s life is all is ever left of endless civilizations, endless eras. whatever its richness be, whatever it may have ever achieved– it crumbles and fades and erodes with the hands of time. but the theatre puts on the play, but the ballad sings his songs, but the artist colours his canvas. but the architecture, etched with murals of life, lies. history repeats itself and so do we. we continue building and loving, but what remains will be simply be the supposedly foolishness we indulge in. as rooney says, we’re simply so stupid about loving each other.
they will keep trying to measure progress in numbers. in how fast we go, how high we build, how efficiently we function. but i think the better question is: how deeply did we feel? what did we choose to carry? how gently did we hold each other through the storm? when it all quiets, what do we really search for, what do we ask each other? were we loved, did we love enough? the pieces of each other we pocket into ourselves, made of community and some invisible thread tying us all, demanding: what do we owe to each other? what matters more, than a life lived, not in numbers, not in climbing a corporate ladder leading to a throne all alone but a life measured in the i love you’s said and unsaid? all the ways we carried ourselves through the times we thought we couldn’t because we looked through the walls, to simply say: i see you.
because when everything collapses – and it always does, in one way or another, we don’t gather around data. we gather around stories. when the scaffolding of certainty falls away, when the systems we trusted fail us, when the things we built start to break, it’s not spreadsheets we turn to. it’s the underlined poem in a drawer. it’s the voice of a song that sounds like someone finally understands. it’s a film we watch again, not because we’ve forgotten the ending, but because we need to believe in it once more. the graveyard holds no bias, six feet under there is no rich man. but there is the son leaning against stone, the tears no one else ever sees. the widow still leaves a bouquet every week. the best friend talking with a crack in the voice to the tomb. all we are is the love we have, long after we are dust.
we gather around songs and paintings and poems that remember us better than history ever could. not for answers, but for comfort. not for logic, but for language that knows the shape of sorrow and still chooses to sing. we press our palms to the walls of old ruins, not to study their architecture, but to feel what remains. to feel what endured. because something always does. something soft. something sacred. something unmeasurable. time passes, changes, but we do not– not fundamentally. sonnets of love. films of connection. artists and their muse. it surpasses the space-time continuum, connects us through those who lived before and those who live after.
it is art that survives the fire. it is story that rises from ash. when the buildings fall, when the power fails, when grief arrives without warning, we search for the parts of us that can’t be calculated. the parts that still ache, that still dream, that still dare to create beauty in the wreckage. and we find them in art. always, in art.
and maybe that’s why i’ve always turned to the ache. to the things that don’t resolve, the feelings that don’t fit inside answers. maybe that’s why i write. not because it heals, but because it bleeds beautifully. because somewhere, beneath all the noise and numbers and deadlines, i am trying to build a language for everything we’re not allowed to say out loud. the holy contradictions of being alive – how we ache for what we can’t have, how we grieve things that are still breathing, how we love people who do not stay, and how we still wait, anyway. maybe so we foolishly “waste” our time making art of stories, stories of art, sealing letters with lipstick. dancing slowly in the kitchen, letting the food burn. looking out over a cliff, and jumping because they jumped too.
the world keeps asking for evidence. for usefulness, for data, for outcomes that can be boxed and sold. but art has never been about evidence. it’s about essence. it’s about the parts of you that can’t be scanned or explained, only felt. art arrives in the spaces we try to hide. it speaks when we no longer know how. it does not demand permission or explanation. it takes root in the silence and grows there, wildly, into something too alive to define. it is not here to be consumed, but to consume you. to reach into the part of you that still believes in something greater than survival. something stranger than logic. something like soul.
and so i keep writing, even when it hurts. especially when it hurts. because pain, too, is a form of remembering. it means we are still touched. it means we are still open. because in the quietest parts of the night, when even your bones feel tired of carrying you, it is not science that keeps you from vanishing – it is the way a single line of poetry hums like a lifeline. it is the melody that finds your name inside its breath. it is the way an old story brushes its thumb across your spine and whispers, you are not alone. when the world vanishes, what keeps you anchored? what keeps you anchored but the spider thread of heart, of the beauty found in the lotus growing in a ditch.
no algorithm understands the way grief pools in the lungs like water with no outlet. no lab has captured the exact sound a heart makes when it breaks not all at once, but slowly, daily, in pieces no one sees. no theory explains why we stay. not because it makes sense. not because it’s safe. but because something in us still softens. still wants to believe. still insists on beauty even when everything is burning.
and maybe we’ll never explain it. maybe that’s the point. the humanities were never meant to resolve the ache. they were meant to hold it. to name it. to give it shape, color, language. they don’t offer conclusions – they offer mirrors. they ask you to look. to look again. to keep looking, even when it hurts. especially when it hurts. and in that ache, something quietly eternal begins to flicker. not a solution, not an answer, but a pulse – the shape of who we are when there’s nothing left to measure, nothing left to prove. when there is only breath. only memory. only the miracle of still wanting more.
not more certainty.
but more meaning. more love. more of the beautiful, aching questions that keep us alive.
WRITTEN BY: gor and Rose ……. Jun 27, 2025
https://substack.com/home/post/p-166977931
