The Fire and the Vigil: On the Act of Creation

 

Photo: Carla Sánchez

The Fire and the Vigil: On the Act of Creation

Dawn breaks within me the same way it breaks over Caracas, over Lima, over Vigo or Ljubljana. Clarity doesn’t arrive all at once, but like a doubt daring to show itself. It’s a slow flare, almost a held breath between two darknesses. And in that initial instant, when the city and my body wake at once, I know that art begins too: not as a task or a trade, but as a form of salvation.
To create is that: to save oneself, even if never completely.

For years I’ve thought that the act of creation is born neither of pleasure nor of a simple need to express, but of something deeper: a call rising from the abyss, a voice that asks no permission and offers no comfort. To write, to sing, to paint, to compose—these are different ways of answering the voice that won’t cease. One does not choose to be an artist; one answers. One answers with the whole body, with memory, with the tremor.

On the days when the soul seems to splinter between routine and hopelessness, art appears like a luminous fissure. Not because it lights up the world, but because it lets us see it from another latitude. Artistic creation is, in a way, a teleological act: it seeks a meaning, a purpose that outstrips the gesture itself. It is not mere ornament for life; it is its justification. To create is to try to grant existence an end beyond its wearing-down.

I’ve lived long enough to understand that art promises no reward. It doesn’t give fame, recognition, or immediate redemption. It gives something more ambiguous: it gives awareness. And that awareness, like any true light, also burns. Every work is a mirror where one contemplates oneself and gets lost, where what was hidden reveals itself without anesthesia. To create is to strip before the mystery of one’s own being. That is why it hurts, and that is why it heals.

I remember the night I played with my band Massel, at the Moulin Rouge in Caracas. There was an electricity in the air that did not come from the instruments, but from something invisible: a communion between those who gave and those who received, between the word spoken and the silence that held it. At the end of the concert, when everything dissolved into a gentle applause, a certainty took hold of me: art does not exist to be understood, but to be felt. In that instant I understood that creation does not seek an audience; it seeks truth. And that truth is not always sweet.

The beauty born of art is not a decoration of the world; it is a breathing wound. Because every act of creation carries with it the memory of loss. We create out of what is missing, out of what never was. Each song, each poem, is an attempt to name the irretrievable. The artist does not invent; the artist remembers. And that remembering is an exercise in love and in mourning.

Sometimes I ask myself what sense there is in continuing to create amid barbarity. The country burns, hope feels like a luxury, and yet, in the smoke, I go on writing. I go on composing. I go on trying. Perhaps because in every word a form of resistance burns. Art, in times of ruin, is a way of saying “I am still here.”

To create is not to flee the world; it is to face it. There is no evasion in poetry nor escape in music. On the contrary: art forces us to look at what others avoid. It makes us witnesses. And to be a witness is a burden. But it is also a privilege. In every work that is born there is a small affirmation of life against death, of love against indifference.

I’ve come to understand that the artist does not seek to master matter, but to listen to it. The true creative act is not imposition; it is dialogue. One sits before the page or the instrument and, in silence, waits. And suddenly something speaks—not always in words; sometimes in images, in sounds, in intuitions—and one becomes a medium for the invisible. Art, in the end, is that: the soul’s conversation with what transcends it.

But that conversation exacts a price. It demands solitude. It demands renunciations. It demands living in a constant tension between the sacred and the everyday. There are days when the creator feels like an impostor, a survivor of himself. And yet a single phrase, a melody, an image can make everything meaningful again. Creation is a perpetual struggle between discouragement and revelation.

I’ve learned to accept that not everything I create belongs to me. There are songs that exceed me, poems that seem to have been written by another voice using me as its instrument. Art has a will of its own. At times it uses us, wears us down, transforms us. That is why creation cannot be an act of pride; it must rather be an exercise in humility. The artist is not a god; the artist is a bridge.

And yet that bridge suffers too. People often believe inspiration is a light grace, but in fact it is a slow combustion. Behind every work there are sleepless nights, futile searches, silences that bite. To create is to persevere in the dark until the form reveals itself. It isn’t a matter of talent, but of faith. A faith that does not look to the heavens, but into the abyss.

Each sunrise reminds me of that invisible discipline. It is not enough to dream; one must embody the dream. Artistic creation is not only an act of imagination; it is a practice of being. It means inhabiting the world with every sense open, registering the tremors of the everyday, translating pain into beauty, fear into rhythm, nostalgia into word.

And in that process one sheds oneself. Every finished work is also a way of dying. But from that death something that endures is born. Art is the only resurrection possible on earth. Through creation, something of us goes on, breathing in other bodies, in other gazes.

Sometimes I think the teleological sense of art does not lie in what it produces, but in what it reveals. Each time we create, we draw a little closer to the origin. Not to an external god, but to that inner spark that binds us to all that exists. To create is to remember that we are part of the same fire. That every form—human, sonic, poetic—seeks its return to the original flame.

Creation is, therefore, a path of return. A return to the lost unity. And along that return, the artist sheds the ego, the need for recognition, the illusion of control. What remains is the pure act: that instant when consciousness and matter coincide. In that instant, time stops, and the soul breathes without fear.

I have seen that suspension in the face of someone who listens to a song and weeps without knowing why. In the gaze of one who contemplates a painting and feels something calling from afar. In the silent reading of a poem that explains nothing, but touches. That is the purpose of art: not to convince, but to move. Not to dictate truths, but to open wounds that heal.

To create is to love what has no name. To love the imperfect, the fleeting, what slips away. And perhaps that is why the artist lives between fullness and loss, between exaltation and emptiness. Every finished work leaves behind an echo that doesn’t fade. And that echo urges us onward, to seek a new form, a new music, a new possibility of saying the unsayable.

Art does not change the world, but it changes the gaze of the one who inhabits it. And in that transformed gaze all true revolution begins. When someone hears a song and feels less alone, when a word lights a corner of the soul, art has fulfilled its destiny. It has touched its teleological end: to reveal the beauty that underlies even ruin.

I keep creating, even amid the noise, because I still believe. I believe in the power of the minimal gesture, in the strength of the word that does not yield, in the melody that persists. I believe that every authentic creation is an act of love. A love that asks for nothing, yet gives everything.

Art has taught me that the only way to remain is to burn. That every form of beauty is also a form of sacrifice. And that in sacrifice one finds fullness.

So every time dawn breaks, I sit at my table before the blinking screen and I wait. Not for success or recognition, but for the miracle of the returning voice. Because when it returns, I know I still have something to say.

And then, with trembling hands and the verb aflame, I repeat to myself, like a secret creed:
I still struggle.
Because I still love.
And in that loving—in that persisting in spite of the void—I find the true meaning of art: to give the soul a form so it does not dissolve.

Gabriel Ganiarov

From my exile in Lima, Peru
November 2025