The City's Lights: Yoshino and the Creative Process and... August Rush

Art is a very tricky thing to write about, because its complexity. You've got someone who hears something, sees something, views something and you find that you have to record it somehow. It may be something that seems rather sane to other people and yourself, or it may be incredibly off the wall and just insane to experience. But you have to record it, hell you may even have to show it to other people, to have them look at/listen to/ read this thing that you know is truth. Then you pray that everyone else isn't crazy and can see what you've made. Or that you've made it right. 

There's no doubt as to whether or not what you've seen is true, it's all in the communication, and in whether or not others can see it. To you, it is truth.

Now there's a reason I included August Rush in this, a Clannad post, because he really is the younger (and purer) Yoshino. He hears something, and realizes that he wants to reproduce what he hears for someone else. He never once loses sight of the fact that it is something that he hears, that he finds beautiful, but it's something he has to share with his parents. Yoshino's story is almost the opposite, it's the dark mirror of it. He has songs, but doesn't know why he's singing them, and realizes eventually that he was only making songs for Kouko Ibuki and himself. That was the audience that mattered to him. The fact that other people heard was really inconsequential to him, and to August as well.

Does this make artists selfish, considering that they only really make things for themselves and a select group of people most of the time? I don't think so, to be honest. Human beings have a need to take what's inside their own private worlds and bring it to the outside, into the outside world. I know that when I make an icon I don't make it to horde, I make it because it's inside of me and I want it to be around me, not just inside.

The inner world and the outer world need to be the same. We all feel this. And that leaves me with a question, one that directly relates back to Clannad: do we all share in the same inner world? Are we really tapping into the same place?