Art is a Lie

As I sang the Silver Aria in yesterday’s studio class my voice teacher had me make direct eye contact with my peers hoping to make the acting in the song more realistic and relatable to the audience. As I sang she would shout out names and for the following phrase I would plead and flirt with the person of her choice. Then, instead of a name, she told me to look at the man who I was in love with and sing to him. On instinct I quickly envisioned his face and build as if he was standing a mere 15’ feet from me in the corner of the room and sang to him. For the first few instants I was Baby Doe singing to Horace Tabor, but then Alexandria recognized the face and build of the man which had materialized. No longer was the man Horace Tabor, rather, the phantasmal version of an old flame with whom I had ended things with what feels like a lifetime ago.

Startled, I tried to change the visage of the man in the corner to someone – anyone – else. Yet, the music reinforced his appearance and I was thankful when I heard “Melissa” shouted allowing my gaze to leave the corner and sing to my friend sitting in a desk right in front of me.

In that instant where the music conjured his image I was taken back to the moment where I became a cliché and fell for him. Yet, as I returned to my seat and the experience replayed in my mind reality burst in, flooding my thoughts with the reasons that things were over reminding my heart that there were no more feelings there for him.

So why him? Why not some other face from some other body or someone else from my past?

Art is nostalgic – hiding old relationships marred with impossibilities behind memories of perfection. Art is epic – heightening the butterflies of a high school crush to a love of Romeo and Juliet proportions. Art is retrospect – created in the past and given new life in the present, it requires the reexamination of its present and our past. Art is counterfeit – masquerading as truth while purging itself of inconvenient details which reality forces upon us.

When I sing the Silver Aria this weekend in the opera auditions, it is likely I will see his face again. When I go from singing to the banker, to the politician and finally to the man that Baby Doe is most in love with his figure will match the man I saw in the corner during studio class. So does this mean anything? Does it mean my life should follow the plot of a romantic comedy as I drop everything and run to him, ending up in front of his door waiting in the pouring rain to tell him that I was wrong and miss him, want him and need him in my life? Not by a long shot. Why? Art isn’t real. As Picasso said “Art is a lie that tells the truth”. Here the lie is his manifestation while the truth is that love which fulfills every nauseating cliché is surprisingly real.