I call this blog “Shared Headspace” because that’s something important to me - trying to occupy space in each other’s minds, sharing each other’s context. I think that’s one of the best effects of art - not just the “wow” or “that’s beautiful” moment, but the newfound insight into the mind and world of the artist.
Art goes beyond this one-on-one interaction between artist and observer, though, and I think this is one of the things that might be easy to miss out on. Obviously no two people will experience an individual piece of art in the same way - but when watching a crowd of people at a concert, it’s obvious they’re sharing something. That group of people becomes linked not only to the performers, but through the performance they become linked to each other. For the length of the concert, they’ll all be focused on the same thing, and to varying degrees (depending on the insight of the listener and the talent of the musicians, I would imagine) experience the same internal landscape. The individual bits of reflection they might have will be different, but everyone listening will walk out of the concert a slightly different individual than they were upon entry - and they’ll all be a tiny bit closer together.
I think that some kinds of music encourage this sort of interlinking, certain mental states, and certain conclusions more than others, but I think all good art can do this for us. Even seeing things differently, we’re still seeing aspects of some single truth - the very essence of what the artist created, something almost impossible to define.
Writing is an art as well, and as such can also bring our minds into similar places. Unsurprisingly, one of my goals for this blog is to help us establish one of these shared headspaces. I’m out of practice, but as I grow and stretch, I hope our common context does as well.