Pieper says that “Reason speaks in words alone but love has a song.” Art is love’s song. It’s a song to cosmos, to God, to being.
It’s gratuitous, excessive, fugal, not necessary for the biological machine. Contemplation only happens with an open hand, with a gift, and with gift-sensibility.
That’s where the muse comes in—if you don’t behold, there is no chance of a gift. Artists from the beginning of time knew that the muse was needed to inspire—
because art comes not only from within us but from outside us—from some meeting of the two.
—Professor Christine Perrin, from a talk presented at CiRCE in 2017