I’ll start by telling you a lie. In life, there’s nothing worse than wanting to commune intimately with a great work of art, and instead finding yourself in a museum packed with a thousand strangers who are determined to stop you from communing with art.

It’s a lie because there are many worse things in life. And it’s also a lie because if you’re in a museum packed with a thousand determined strangers, then the museum is packed with a thousand and one determined strangers, of which you’re one. Complain to yourself about yourself, man! You are the problem!

From the packed museum in our packed world, we zoom out and out and out. We go to the Creative Source, the mysterious and indescribable force that moves us forward, that nourishes us, that guides us. Mother Nature, Father Universe, Granny Babushka, the mysterious has been called as many names as there are grains of sand in Malibu Beach. This mysterious force has caused the birth of every song, every poem, every sculpture, every book, every building, and every cookie ever baked. The Creative Source awoke Paul Gauguin and took him to Tahiti, and Tahiti made Gauguin paint gorgeous paintings, and the gorgeous paintings awoke art collectors and museums, and the museums awoke you and a thousand others. Behind every event in the sequence, the Creative Source is at play.

We’re back where we started, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, visited by nearly four million people a year. Four million visitors divided by 300 visiting days equals 13.333,333 . . . 333 . . . 333 . . . You’re trying to look at a painting by Gauguin, and 13.333 people plus one-third of a person (armpit and knee) are preventing you from doing it.

You have two choices: despair or rejoice. That’s it, two choices only! Metaphysics gives you no leeway, no room for initiative, no way out!

Despair means pissing and moaning about the crowds, the hoi polloi, the plebeians, the proletariat, the great unwashed, the ragtag and bobtail, the ignoramuses and the ignoramusai or whatever the hell is the plural for ignoramus (which is Latin for “I don’t know exactly what”).

Rejoice means, hey, I’m here now, and it’s quite fascinating to see so many different people from all over the world united in their contagious compulsion, no two people truly alike, not a single museum goer other than you having your personal view of Gauguin and Manet and all the other incredible artists assembled in an incredible building in an incredible city.

Give up the idea of standing close to a painting and communing with it. Instead, watch people and take photos of them and become an artist yourself. Don’t look at art made by a bunch of dead white males. Be a dead white male who isn’t dead yet!

Photography doesn’t have to reproduce reality or its physical traits, although it can do that to some degree. Like painting and literature, photography is capture-by-transformation, also known as transformation-by-capture. Art doesn’t depict reality; it reveals the greater truth behind the entity misleadingly called reality. Reality is a thousand and one sardines. Art is “Love for Sardines: Triptych.”

Reality is a bored museum guard looking forward to retirement. Art is “Museum Guard at the Musée d’Orsay, Sitting Near the Diminished yet Monumental Remains of Claude Monet’s Daring Response to Edouard Manet’s Extremely Daring ‘Déjeuner sur Herbe.’”

Reality is a child riding on her dad’s shoulders. Art is “An Archetype, Eternal and Universal, Composed, Saturated, and Filtered, Framed and Displayed so that You Become the Daughter, You Become the Father.”

At some point reality and art coincide. Because you’re focused and adaptable, because you’ve been monitoring the environment and the people in it, you sense an opportunity and you take it. A great painting stands alone, as it were, ignored by the crowd. You park yourself in front of it and you commune with it (the individual expression of the Creative Source) and with It (the Creative Source itself). You can stand there as long as you like, and you can look at it as close as you like, eye-to-eye.

If you aren’t in the neighborhood of the Musée d’Orsay, you can accomplish the absolute same thing by simply looking at your husband or wife or child or friend eye-to-eye. The Creative Source will reveal itself to both the seer and the seen.