we are thinking. When one is thinking she or he is talking to someone else in her or his mind, in her or his inner speech. This can be one’s father or mother or teacher or friend or loved one or enemy or a hero of a book, etc. Of course, those interlocutors may be more or less unrecognized, so we do not quite clearly realize who we are talking to, but this is a matter of psychology and is not crucial for our subject. (Normally, an adult is under the impression that he is talking to himself.) What is crucial for our subject is that an author is conversing with his potential audience and other authors.
Obviously, an artwork itself means nothing until somebody sees it, listens to it, etc. A work of art represents culture at the moment that it emerges as the subject of inner or outer dialogue. Remove dialogue, and art becomes a piece of canvas, some ink, a tape, etc.
Interestingly, if we remove art—and thus novelty—from dialogue, it turns into banal, senseless, animal-like communication.
When do you talk? When you want to be heard, understood, and responded to. You write (film, sing, etc.) to be read (watched, listened to, etc.), understood, and responded to. And while on the outside a new creation invokes new understanding in other people, the same amazing thing happens inside, in the creator’s inner dialogue: all of the author’s inner interlocutors develop an understanding of the new creation. The author talks to his inner interlocutors about this new world. That actually means he develops his own new understanding, his new alter ego, or more precisely, a new face of his alter ego, with every single work.
Free human communication or dialogue is the most general mechanism in the development of the arts and all creativity, generally speaking.
Actually, art is a dialogue. Its very fabric is produced at that very moment when a writer is writing (that is, he is talking in his mind), when a reader is reading (is talking in his mind to the author, friends, enemies, etc.), when a person is thinking (is talking in his mind to his alter ego), etc. All of this occurs in the realm of ultimate freedom and only there. Let us always remember that.
Freedom of inner speech is one of the main conditions required and, at the same time, is the motivation to create. It is another law of
