“Self expression” is the enemy of Art.

We’re not seeing much good Art bc the lines between private/personal, communal or “social”, the civilizational & the Ultimate/Transcendent have been totally blurred. We’re no longer situating ourselves in coherent relation to Creation

Think about someone like David Lynch~ is he “expressing himself”? It’s much more like he’s bearing witness to phenomena , recognizing patterns & artfully recapitulating them via formal properties of film

Miyazaki is another good example. Current year “creatives” would approach something like Spirited Away by first asking if they could “identify” with a 10 year old girl. Miyazaki’s movies are in no sense *about* the person of Miyazaki ~

If he has an ur-motivation, it’s something like a desire to write a love letter to Creation itself. Animation is the form it took, but one could easily imagine Miyazaki (or Lynch for that matter) as a composer or an architect