We’ve all seen some piece of media that’s absolutely taken us. Maybe it’s a show or movie that goes beyond being entertaining, and utterly captivates us, enraptures us until after it’s over, we don’t quite feel like the world is the same. Perhaps it’s a piece of music that sounds as if the artist used your brain waves to write the sheet music, a song that couldn’t be for anyone but you. Or art that becomes such a unifying pillar in your psyche that your very notion of beauty is tied to your appreciation of it.
It’s hardly a new thought, that a piece of the passionate creator lives in the creation. The sentiment’s so common that ‘made with love’ is more frequently inverted as a joke than uttered sincerely. While the truth of grandma’s savory fried chicken may actually be lard, and no hesitation to use as much as feels right, I do believe that there’s a literal truth to the sentiment. It’s not something that can be invoked consciously; in fact, trying to make something with passion inevitably leads to nothing but agonizing, painstaking exercises in futility. The passion comes from the goal, whether it be making delicious food, or sating the urge that drove you to create in the first place.
Indeed, the word passion originates in describing a struggle, a state of enduring that’s likely most associated with Jesus Christ—‘The Passion of the Christ.’ Some of that struggle is indelibly etched into the result, and those etchings can be sensed. Maybe it’s literal: subtle signs in composition or presentation that, due to evolutionary branching our minds associate with importance much like how the sensation of being watched can be explained by unaware awareness of observers, handled by exceptionally precise portions of our brain.
It could even be my—and others who think like me—own idiosyncrasies affecting our perception. Something I’m particularly prone to failing if I don’t watch myself is accounting for the fact that every good thought I’ve ever had still had to filter through my mind.
Whether this intrinsic feeling in some media, that speaks to us in undercurrents beneath the surface is scientifically explainable or something spiritual—or even cultural fiction that just feels right—seems impossible to answer due to how differently we can see the world. Yet, it’s hard for me to deny the fact that some things we come across resonate with us, on a deeper level than just appreciation of the result.
