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           If you live in a city or similar man-made environment, you probably are very used to tuning things out. There is so much input that assaults all the senses, not just the visual or auditory, that without our selective attention we would be in constant overwhelm. We may, in fact, be in overwhelm and ignore its effects as best we can in order to function at some modicum level of effectiveness. Probably many of us – maybe even most of us –  are drawn to the arts because with them we are given constructs that have defined limits. Stories, whether written or visual in the form of literature or film, have specific beginnings, middles, and ends. Everything is carefully structured by the author for maximum emotional and/or intellectual effect. We enter the story and exit it at specific points in time. It won’t matter if there are flashbacks or if the narrative proceeds other than chronologically because we perceive what the intended structure is and accept that for that particular work. We get the sense of completion with any work of art.

            Life has its own kinds of organizational structures, but these are not always so easily defined. There is much overlap, and because so many things are happening at once, we can only focus attention on a limited number at any given moment in time. When we go into the imaginative or virtual space of a work of art, we generally lose awareness of time, our surroundings, and possibly ourselves. In the “real” world, we create and carry with us our limitations as we do focus on whatever we deem important and/or necessary in the moment. Even though we may have broadened our so-called connectivity with the larger world through cyberspace, we still can only take in so much of the cyber-world within a given time frame. Our attention span has not changed, only the input that comes into it.

            In a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine, noted Talking Heads David Byrne discusses music and what he sees as the necessity to sometimes take a break from it. Music, being art, is very much a construct, and some musical artists have tried to understand and express the musicality of life itself. Other artists, both visual and performing, have also attempted to make art that expresses some truth about life and recreates a living or life-like experience. Performance art, street theater, improvisational art, action painting, process-focused art, and other not so easily-defined expressions have been attempts to get at some truth about life. Composer John Cage incorporated random sounds into some of his work to reflect the randomness associated with everyday existence. He incorporated silence into pieces to reflect the pauses that occur in natural rhythms, the space between heartbeats, for example, or the pause between one breath and another.

            Some musicians (and visual artists) looked for hidden rhythms in the cacophony of civilization’s noise. Others noticed that in nature, there also is constant sound that follows a kind of organization created by the local environment. Painters will readily understand that any randomly selected area of a thicket, grove of trees, or bend in a stream can offer up a range of possible built-in structural formats. There are shapes, forms, light and dark contrasts that will be noticed and used in the construction of a painting. One could even paint a given area within almost any field of vision, paint it exactly as perceived (if that is even possible), and some kind of organization would be represented. This might not give a good composition, but one could create an argument for having represented a natural order. Even here, though, the artist has picked and chosen what was represented. One cannot show everything seen nor can one record every sound heard. A camera cannot perform this task with light any better than a microphone can with sound.

             We have to edit our experience. We cannot, as the Buddhist sage might suggest, pay attention to everything all the time, although we might try. We have a need for order, and we have a need for space. Art is one of the ways that we order our experience to express how we might feel about the world but also to better understand the word in which we live. Sometimes we utilize light, but we also need dark. We enjoy sound, but we also need silence. Perhaps we are already primed by nature to prefer certain kinds of rhythms and structures. Some have said that we are nature observing itself. We may also be nature expressing itself through the art that we create.