{"id":30142,"date":"2025-06-04T20:23:31","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T17:23:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yaronmargolin.com\/?p=30142"},"modified":"2025-06-16T02:52:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-15T23:52:24","slug":"belonging-and-the-highest-pleasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yaronmargolin.com\/?p=30142","title":{"rendered":"Belonging and Supreme Delight: Grasping the Core of Artistic Being"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hebrew<\/a><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Nicu Horodniceanu<\/a><\/strong> \u2014 my teacher and spiritual father. All rights reserved. He watched over me with love, until his last breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Illustration: Yaron Margolin with the help of ChatGPT \u2014 A dramatic painting in the style of Rembrandt, showing Moses in a moment of deep inner struggle. He stands on a rocky mountain, holding the second set of stone tablets (the Ten Commandments) with both hands. His face shows conflict and pain \u2014 should he break them again or deliver them to a people who will not understand? The sky is dark and stormy, suggesting the weight of his decision. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Belonging and the Supreme Joy(Translated from Hebrew<\/a> \u2013 Original by Yaron Margolin)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are rare and unique moments in the life of the spirit when a person is not seeking the truth\u2014but remembering it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a deep sense of belonging\u2014not to another person, a group, a nation or a land\u2014but to wisdom, to love, to art, and to the idea itself. An inner encounter, almost sacred, with a supreme understanding that draws the person into the depths of the soul, lifts them like a feather<\/strong> in the wind, weightless, carried high above the mundane reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In such a moment, emotion, movement, thought, and beauty fuse into a marvelous clarity\u2014a brightness that cannot be separated. The act\u2014whether writing, painting, or dancing\u2014serves as an anchor, settling the person in a protected harbor, preserved like a steady boat in the heart of a storm. This is true creation: the birth of something new from inner strength, from a surprising connection with something that has long captivated the heart, and now comes to life\u2014finding its precise language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Such articulation is so essential, so grand, that only<\/strong> the lack of social recognition may cause great suffering\u2014as happened with Rembrandt, who suffered doubly from the gap between the depth of his work and the public\u2019s understanding. Rembrandt lost his freedom, his property, his friends\u2014and yet he continued to paint despite the pain of rejection. It is not merely a question of one who seeks truth or belonging, but of one who remembers it. This is the power of Moses<\/strong> at Sinai: he knows the wise advice will be rejected, and still gives it with the aching heart of a father\u2014for he is responsible. It is a kind of courage: the love of sublime understanding\u2014even when its precise articulation may lead, eventually, to pain. But how many spirits like this exist? How many Rembrandts are there in the world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fear of Birth<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There is no necessity for giving birth\u2014only fear. Many great artists have felt the deep fear of the moment when their inner formulation appears revolutionary\u2014and is about to be revealed to the world. Fear of rejection, dismissal, social isolation\u2014of not belonging\u2014these hang like heavy clouds over their heads, like a hailstorm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Illustration: Yaron Margolin with the help of ChatGPT \u2014 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Like Moses breaking the Tablets\u2014a moment of rage and despair in the face of rejection and resistance to the new, to wise counsel\u2014the artist too may struggle between the urge to express their inner insight (what some call \u201ctruth\u201d) and the fear that it will be dismissed or suppressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The excitement of insight, the moment when the spirit lifts the feather.<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Illustration: Yaron Margolin with the help of ChatGPT \u2014 Alcibiades<\/strong> Taming the Wild Horse, inspired by Plato\u2019s Chariot Allegory<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In the academic world, the desire for public recognition and adherence to accepted standards forms the foundation of belonging. Often, this outweighs the clarity of inner awakening. It becomes decisive: one must cite sources, prove alignment with the existing body of knowledge\u2014sometimes even statistical. You want to write \u201cfeather,\u201d but the academic sources say \u201cleaf blown in the wind,\u201d so the student writes \u201cleaf.\u201d There is no feather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fear of not belonging is basic, and it can take over\u2014blocking authentic creation. And it does. Newton<\/strong> sat for 20 years thinking how to articulate the insight he likely reached by chance or sudden flash. He invented differential and integral calculus not for its own sake\u2014but so that he would not be rejected by the academy. How many Newtons are there in the world?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Secrets of Artificial Intelligence<\/strong>
In New York, one can get a glimpse of where global technology is headed.
Yesterday I met one of the brilliant minds behind AI, St.<\/strong> Pierre<\/strong> Nick<\/strong>.
The current frontier? Creativity.
How can we embed creativity into the process between command and execution \u2014 in that fleeting moment before AI takes action?
Their office sits right on the waterfront, facing the Statue of Liberty in Red Hook.
And the goal? To reach the truly creative \u2014 not those who chase success, acceptance, belonging, or status; not those who use what already exists and remix it into tens of thousands of cloned sheep, auto-generated songs, or recycled dances \u00e0 la Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker \u2014 a student of Flora Cushman, my own teacher, who burst onto the world stage in 1983 erasing what came before her. Israel was among the first to be erased.
Today, faded replicas of her work flood the scene \u2014 often blended with echoes of Pina Bausch.
This longing for belonging is deeply human, but it has nothing to do with art.
Familiar materials, hybridizations, and endless recycling allow most people to "collaborate" \u2014 and to blend in.
We agreed to meet again tomorrow to explore how this challenge might be overcome.
I only agreed if they improve the coffee.
\ud83d\udcf8 Photo by Ben Tritt, June 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Artificial Intelligence, the Academy, and the Artist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Today, when people speak of artificial intelligence, they must beware of illusion. AI is not Newton\u2014and it certainly was not created by Aspasia<\/strong>. It is the product of academic demand\u2014born in the constraints of a system rooted in existing knowledge. And if these constraints are ever removed, humanity may destroy it out of fear and dread.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Aspasia<\/strong> \u2013 a woman of profound curiosity, a teacher of wisdom and freedom.
She did not memorize \u2014 she questioned. Curiosity was the nourishment of her soul \u2014 and through it, she knew how to draw thought from her students.
This is what education looked like in its origin: her body in motion, her hair lifted by the wind, her eyes meeting those of her student \u2014 Socrates, or Pericles (one of her greatest disciples) \u2014 not as a vessel to be filled, but as a partner in creation.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

AI functions within a realm of existing knowledge\u2014mixing, filtering, cross-referencing\u2014just like the academy, whose goal is to collect, sort, and present accumulated knowledge. Academics, like machines, are born and raised within this world, trained to think from what has already been said, and not beyond it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The artist, by contrast\u2014like the philosopher, like Aspasia<\/strong> in ancient times\u2014experiences the profound excitement of awakening\u2014of the precise formulation of a new understanding. It is not born from previous knowledge, but from an internal birth of comprehension and depth. It is a different experience: a surrender to the moment in which knowledge transforms into a new, living, primal truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many academic lecturers do not experience this moment of excitement. For them, truth is merely another data point\u2014while for the artist and the philosopher, it is the magic of birth. This, as Plato writes<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have questions?<\/strong>
Yaron Margolin will be happy to answer \u2014 with clarity, care, and no false promises.
Just real knowledge, hope, and a clear path forward.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n
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