Art has the ability to express emotions that words are incapable of relating.
I once heard songwriter David Crosby—of the group Crosby, stills, and Nash—remark that as an artist, his job was to put into words things that basically weren’t compatible with language. It was 2014 and he was speaking in the context of a medical procedure he had had and how, upon emerging healthy from it, he was, for the first time in his life, speechless at what the doctors had done for him. He said as an artist, he was completely unfamiliar with that feeling. It revealed to him the gravity of the situation he’d been through.
That quotation stuck with me. Indeed, it was a sign of his ability as an artist that he was able to grasp and express that role for an artist. It’s not just songwriters who do this. All artists take upon themselves the job of making communicable