It was addictive, watching Kamasi's control over his instrument as if he were completely one with it. He was never garrulous, no note was ever excessive. He was restrained even when it seemed as if he had surrendered completely to the outpouring. I was awestruck. How does one achieve such a level of active presence in one's art-making practice? It was as if he had reached a state of being by which he was permanently ready to be a conduit and an interlocutor.

That morning, I had been transcribing a long conversation I'd had with my artist friend, Mithu Sen. She was speaking about potentiality and found herself referencing the female body and its ovaries. For her, making art was about being in a state of certain readiness where you were waiting for contact with something that feels external to you, that can only be imbibed from the world in which you belong in order to fertilise your consciousness. Artistic presence, she seemed to suggest, was about an intervention between the world outside and the world within, and how the two collided and commingled to evolve a third state. I always termed that level of consciousness 'being in the flow'. It's when everything comes together and there is a current that connects the brain to the heart to soul to fingertips. The physical manifestation or consequence is what I like to call my art.

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The moments I find myself inside the flow are marked by the deliciousness of an otherwise inconceivable joy. Clarice Lispector called it a state of grace. From my first-hand experience I've fathomed that being able to stay in that state has to do with the act of listening, which, as a verb has the connotation of actively tuning into the frequency of the self; or perhaps a notion of the self that is so expansive it encompasses so much more than that which lies beyond the boundaries of one's own consciousness. Is listening also the beginning of empathy? And where does rage fit in? How does one transform one's anger against the world's continuing injustices through the prism of one's art?

Even though I desperately hoped Kamasi would end with his subversive 'Clair de Lune', I was elated when he announced 'Fists of Fury'; a poignant protest piece that derives its title from the Bruce Lee film. Lee has actually been on my mind a lot since I learned how his philosophy of consciousness — Be Water — has been the inspiration for the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters. "Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless — like water," says his martial arts instructor character in the TV series, Longstreet. "Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. Put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash." In Kamasi's version, it is the fist that has this transformational potential through the spectrum of symbolic gestures it is capable of making.

I like the metaphor of the fist. It comes closest to the part of the body that performs the act of writing. And I love the evocation of the titular fury, it personifies the role rage plays in my consciousness because I am incapable of distancing myself from the impact of the world's injustices. Mostly I find conceptual resonance in the idea of art as more than narcissistic self-expression.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper

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