About Art - Some questions

I do not love you….
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this: where
I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest
is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
-Pablo Neruda (An excerpt)

There is no rhyme; there are no high falutin metaphors.
It’s almost as if someone is talking to you, and telling you that this is the only way he knew to love – straightforwardly, without complexities or pride.
I like Neruda’s poems because they are so direct–like the way he loved his women – straightforward and un-complex.

Doesn’t the image of Neruda almost jump out at you when you read this poem?
A young Neruda, heartbroken, on a sea shore, looking at the stars and saying this poem out loud. Missing his lover, her hand on his chest, her eyes.
This is almost always the impression I have when I read his poems.
Most are about a love lost, about longing.
What I imagine will mostly be inaccurate, but that is the image he inspires in me.
Of a lover writing about love, of a person who lost his beloved writing about longing.
It’s authentic, genuine.

This brings me to another of my favorite poems:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,
I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I like this one all the more because of the last line.
And in this case too in my mind I see Elizabeth Barrett Browning so passionately in love (either romantic or divine) with someone that death is not the end, maybe just another beginning.

The point I am trying to make is that all poems I love create a very vivid image in my mind of the poet himself/herself being in that situation and reciting the poem. This is more often than not far from the truth and I recognize that, but for the duration when I read the poem, it feels that the poet is living the poem.

Which lead me to the questions:
Can you write only about the things you feel first hand?
Do you always have to feel it to write it effectively?
Can you only write about love, longing or loss only when you have been through these emotions yourself?
Can you feed off of someone else’s emotions, can you write when the emotions are second handed?
What about imagination, extrapolation?
Can you extrapolate emotions too?
Can you speculate about how you would have felt, how you would have dealt, without actually feeling it and dealing with it?

I get these doubts because I came to understand poetry about love and loss only when I loved and lost. There was a connect with the poem, prose even, only when I had been through the emotions myself. Lot of friends had described how it is to be in love, how it is to have your love unrequited, but it made sense only when I went though it.
(Don’t read too much into this now! All my mini-loves are unrequited; don’t ask me to name names!)

So, forget for a moment about writing – or more generally creating any other work of art – even for art appreciation, is it equally necessary to have experienced the principal emotion first hand? Does the work of art hold more meaning to you then?

I realise I am out of my depth here to answer these questions, but I will try nevertheless.

All fiction they say is at least to some extent autobiographical.
You cannot help but let in some elements of yourself into the work. It is easy to write about things you know, emotions you have gone through. And though we tend to imagine our loves being peerless, our tragedies unique and our miseries unparalleled, the truth is we are all intersecting circles with a great deal of shared experiences. Along with the comfort collective joy or misery gives, it also forms the basis for the connection between the auteur and his audience.

If it's a thought that shapes a sculpture, there is the same or a congruent thought in someone else that makes him see the reason behind the symmetry, if it is an ideal that shapes your sensitivity as a film maker, you will have someone else swearing by the same ideals who understands the motive behind the characters you etch, if its an emotion that gushes forth as a poem, you will find a kindred soul who will hear the music you weaved into the poem.
So maybe it’s these overlaps between people and experiences that make art and its appreciation at once universal and deeply personal.

But what about the times when you have to write about things alien to you?
Surely you cannot always write only about first hand experiences. The world is a big place and you cannot drink in every experience.
It is then we resort to generalizations.

How can I describe an orphan's childhood accurately when I grew up smothered by parental love?
How can I describe a paraplegic's helplessness when mobility is a non-issue personally?
How can I recount a bitter divorce after a long marriage without having even wed?
Sure, I can say that the orphan felt lonely and incomplete, the paraplegic felt angry and defeated and the divorce was gut-wrenching.
How much ever I elaborate would it ever be the same as say how an actual orphan might chronicle his days?
I don't know.

While I can speculate to an extent in each of these cases, I feel there will still be something lacking.
Maybe its talent or maybe it’s the practice of repeatedly flinging yourself into other's bodies and peering into their minds that makes you good at it.
Maybe then there will be an element of truth in what we say about others.
And by extension more truth in what we say about ourselves.