Convergence in Illusion and Divergence in Reality

The quiet rewiring that happens when art and the artist are separated

Convergence in illusion and divergence in reality

Have you ever noticed how certain music or any art and the presence behind it quietly take the centre stage in our minds, without our consciously inviting them there?

Ever noticed how a voice, or the sound of an instrument, or a painting slowly becomes indistinguishable from the one who shapes it — until one very defining moment in life that just reveals a wide gap between the two?

Some realisations arrive like this.

Not always with disruption, but often with an initial sense of unease. And then, slowly, with clarity. They simply show us where something we had always held together begins to part, gently.

Until then, it had always felt like a single, seamless truth. Then comes the confusion — what is real, what is illusion — and though we begin to sense the shift, it is only later that we realize how the two had already begun to separate.

I stayed in that uncertain space for a while, until clarity began to show me what I truly needed to hold on to.

For a long time, I did not realise how naturally I had allowed art and the artist to remain inseparable in my mind. To stay with the work was also, in some way, to stay with the presence behind it.

Admiration did not feel like a choice. It felt like the most natural way of listening — and of completely making something one’s own.

Only later did I begin to recognise how much of that wholeness was shaped by expectation.

Nothing dramatic happened. There was no sudden turning point that called for a decision. Reality simply began to stand beside what I had long believed. And once I could see them together, I could also see the distance growing between them. Some distances felt small. Others were so wide that they left me with only one choice: to just hold on to the art, and let go of the artist.

For some time, I was hard on myself for not having noticed that distance earlier. It seemed, in hindsight, so clear. I wondered how something that once felt so seamless had quietly gathered more meaning than it was meant to hold.

But perhaps that is how such listening begins.

We first receive art as something whole. Only later do we begin to recognise where it ends, and where the person behind it begins. And perhaps that recognition cannot be forced. It arrives only when something within us is ready to see differently.

The art itself had not changed.

What changed was the way I held it.

I slowly began to understand that the work did not need to carry the weight of the one who created it in order to remain meaningful. It could stand on its own. Perhaps it always had.

What shifted was my way of listening.

Since then, I come back to certain works differently — not with the same seamless certainty as before, but with a clearer sense of the space they now occupy within me. The listening continues, but it carries with it, a different awareness.

Once, it had all been one feeling. Now, it is two. And somewhere within that distance, the art finally began to stand on its own.

Perhaps this is inevitable. People change. Their art changes with them. Time reshapes both in ways we cannot always follow. And yet, there are those works that have quietly shaped us in our formative years — not just as art, but as memory.

Although the shift began in my early twenties, it is in my late thirties that it feels settled — a willingness to slow down, and to gently hold on to what once shaped me.

So maybe the question is: when everything else changes: people, art, even our ways of listening…do we hold on to what is, or to what it once meant to us?

Perhaps, the latter!