Babar Moghal

In my view, art and music, to a certain extent, need to speak on their own terms without any conceptual framework. Visual art and music are forms of language with actual tangible, visual, or audible content, indicating rather than stating.

According to Joseph Campbell, a symbol displays a double aspect, and we must distinguish between the "sense" and the "meaning" of the symbol. It is evident that all the great and little symbolical systems of the past functioned simultaneously on three levels: the corporeal of waking consciousness, the spiritual of dreams, and the ineffable of the absolutely unknowable. The term "meaning" can refer only to the first two, but these are now the domain of science, which deals with signs, not symbols. The ineffable, the absolutely unknowable, can only be sensed, and this is the province of art, which is not merely an expression but, primarily, a quest for and formulation of experience that evokes energy-waking images, yielding what Sir Herbert Read aptly termed a "sensuous apprehension of being."