Neshan Magazine | مجله نشان

Handmade: Immortality of Poetry and Thought

Before the advent of hardware and software in all aspects of human life, which are now indispensable, all professions and means of communication were based on rules of physics and chemistry executed by human hands upon the order by the brain. Before the twentieth century theories introduced language as the source of human evolution, Darwin's theory considered the mutation to humanity as rooted in handling instruments. This idea is still hard to disregard. During this growth of human hands and brain and years after the great invention by Gutenberg and together with the expansion of urban life and communication, one hundred and some years ago a profession called graphics emerged and its colorful presence has been (more in the past) dependent on handmade tools. Besides the handy tools on work desk, photography cameras and dark room equipment and lithography might have been the cause, however distant, to trigger the designer's thought giving him the power to choose. The handmade graphic tools of designers found their ways into museums to be classified as classics. While trying not to unreasonably discard new tools, why do we keep getting agitated by seeing or hearing about the past works? Which nerve in us is still so reactive to immortal works of music, literature, painting, sculpture, cinema and theater that makes our hearts pound and our minds transform? Is it the inside forces of the artist embodied in the work and the direct touch of the earthly tools of the birth and invariable presence of the mind-boggling repetitive incident of that infinite absent force in an earthly shape? Isn't it high time contemporary works made by photography, film, music and graphics through software found their way into museums? Can't we put their immortality into vote? Is it the increasing tendency to variety which has made the lifespan of works of art so short? Or is it the hasty development of production-consumption cycle which makes thing outmoded so rapidly? Poetry is still the purest of human arts which is created by a pen and some paper or if not, by the marks of a stick on sand or if not, by the flow of language into ears. We had better forget about tools after having learned how to use them. We have got to unshackle ourselves from the yoke of tools. We ought to free the varicolored butterfly of thought from the dark cocoon of brain in order to see the return of joy into this world.