Expression through dance is something I can relate to since I feel it all the time: when I hear the right music (which could even just be music in my head :P), there's this need to let this thing out of me, which can only be released through movement.
The visual art thing, on the other hand, I didn't really get. As intrinsically enjoyable as the act of drawing is for me, I'm rarely compelled to do it in the first place. But for perhaps the first time ever, I recently had a taste of that compulsion: I went out to a lake one evening with a bunch of friends. The moon was a huge, orange crescent hanging low in the black sky. As we stood around by the lake, looking at the stars, we realized the moon was getting lower on the horizon. Soon enough it had reached the lake itself, and I stood there, captivated, unable to look away as this orange crescent moon sank into the water like a ship on fire. Something about this nearly moved me to tears, and it felt like the ship was drawing the breath out of me and taking it with it as it sank. I couldn't bring myself to move until long after the last point of light had vanished on the horizon, and I desperately wished that I could capture what I'd just experienced... preserve it somehow, in the form of a painting.
Of course, I am in no way a painter, and it would be terrible to destroy that experience as it exists in my memory by seeing whatever awful rendering I might produce on paper, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Even my written description just now, which I tried to gloss over as much as possible (while still getting the gist of it across) in order to avoid this very thing, has kind of sullied my memory of the event. :| In any case, even if my inability to express myself through these means stops me from actually doing it, I've now at least had a glimpse of what it's like to want to express myself through visual art.
In this case, the desire to capture a moment made me want to create art: to take my experience of that event and turn it into a physical object so I could have it later, maybe share it with others. In the past, I've been driven by various emotions to write things -- sometimes poetry, sometimes other things -- and it has mostly been because of a need to take whatever I was feeling at the time and get it out of me. To reach in and grab hold of it and pull it out and get rid of it, so I could stop experiencing whatever feeling of unrest was roiling inside me. And aside from looking at what I've just pulled out only long enough to see that it is indeed the thing, in its entirety, that I wanted to get rid of, that's generally the end of it, and I don't deal with the thing any further.
But today, for some reason, I read some things I'd written a while back, during a time when I felt quite different than I do these days. Even though I remember a lot of things from that time, even some events in plenty of detail, I generally can't recall the specific feelings I had. Perhaps it's akin to the way you might remember the face of someone you once knew long ago; you might have a rough picture, but it's hazy and doesn't capture the details -- the features that make that person distinct from others with the same sort of look. Yet if you actually see the person, they're immediately recognizable, even alongside other, similar-looking people. In the same way, though I could no longer remember my feelings from these past times, as I read these things that I'd once written, everything I'd been experiencing at the time came crashing over me again. Nuances of emotion that I still wouldn't know how to begin describing in plain words. Somehow I didn't expect that reading these things could put those feelings back into me, even in spite of how irrelevant they are to the present. That is, given how things are now, it doesn't even make sense that I should be able to feel these things from these other times.
It's as if, in writing each of those things, I distilled that immediate experience out of me and bottled it like a drug... and all it takes to once again experience everything I'd managed to draw out of myself back then is to sip from that little bottle.
I suppose, then, that if another person has had experiences similar enough to that from which a given drug was distilled, they too can be affected by it; this is perhaps what makes art resonate with certain people but not others. This would certainly explain why until a few years ago I had very little appreciation for the arts: I hadn't even begun to live yet.
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