4 posts tagged “art”

JK Rowling has just "revealed" a hidden fact about Albus Dumbledore, one of the major players in her Harry Potter series.  (I won't reveal it myself...it's easy enough to find all over the Internet right now.)

In my opinion, once a work of art has been released, the artist has no more "authority" on what happens between the lines than the reader does.  If a fact was relevant, it should have been in the book.  If something was left out, it's up to the reader's imagination.  And if something was ambiguous...well, that's where the most fun of readership comes in.  Stories resonate with us in different ways.  The ambiguities are exactly what give us the joy of reading and imagining.

When I was really into Ernest Hemingway, I was reading not only everything he wrote but also everything I could find that was written about him.  He used to have an idea of a "whole story" and write a subset of it.  Stories like "Big Two-Hearted River" resonate with us because we know that there is a healing going on with the main character, a return to nature, but we don't know why.  If Hemingway was to say "Well, it's because of such and such of an atrocity that he saw during World War I," it wouldn't make the story better...it would detract. 

He left it out because the story resonates more with the reader by letting us put in our own inner hurts that need to be healed.

I also saw lots of articles about the Hemingway story Cat in the Rain.  It was amazing to me: people were arguing about whether the cat given to the "American wife" is the same cat that she saw outside.  But if you think of it from the point of view of Hemingway knowing how much to reveal and how much to leave out, you realize the entire point of the story is not about whether the cat is rescued.  If it was, he would have made it clear.  People have correctly identified this lines "Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important" as a turning point in the story, but some have said that it means that she is pregnant.  Hemingway allows you to imagine that situation, or not, as you like.  It is fun to go over the story in our minds, imagining different scenarios.  But since it is left ambiguous, we have to assume that it is not the "point" of the story.  And if we were to discover handwritten notes by Hemingway saying she is, or isn't, pregnant, that wouldn't change the impact of the story.  He left it out because that is not the point.

What the story is about has to be found in what is given by the artist when the story is delivered.  No further information that had been withheld by the artist can change that.  How the story makes you feel is produced by your imagination when you read the story.  The author has no right to tell you if your imaginations are right or not by telling you "what really happened."

I see Cat in the Rain as a story of a woman feeling like a cat in the rain, but discovering a power she didn't realize she had.  That she can influence her surroundings.  Somebody else may feel something different.  Our framework for discussion would be the story, not anything outside the story.

One last example.  Famous poem by Ezra Pound:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I never see this poem printed anywhere as just a poem.  It's always printed along with notes of how he came up with this poem (see an example here).  The poem and the notes together have become the work of art.  To me, that lessens the poem itself.  The whole thing becomes a new story--a fascinating story--but the poem itself has less room to move me.

A friend of mine just sent me three links.

The first is called Catalog Choice.  This is a one-stop site to let you unsubscribe to paper catalogs that you receive in the mail.  Some of this may not be considered "junk mail"--you may have wanted the catalogs at some point.
http://www.catalogchoice.org/

GreenDimes goes further, helping you reduce junk mail.  It's not just about saving trees, either.  When I think of all the effort that goes into a piece of junk mail, from original idea of some marketer, to printing, shipping, delivering, to me carrying it straight from the mailbox to the trashcan...it's too much. 
http://www.greendimes.com/

If you would like an artistic way of seeing what humans are doing to the planet, check out Chris Jordan's work:
http://www.chrisjordan.com/

have lunch with an artist.  any medium.

GO

I'm going to continue the (mostly mental) analysis I've been doing but I am becoming aware that an answer is beginning to well up in my heart.  So...I will spend a few more days in my introspection but then I'll turn it over to my heart and let it give me the answer in its own time.

So, I've outlined my negatives of focusing on only one thing.  Most of them looked like fears to me, and I'm betting that most of those fears are unfounded.  But it was nice to let them out.

Now for the positives of focusing on one project at a time:

• all my creative energy gets channeled into one area...this should result in higher returns
• it frees me up to "work when I'm working, relax when I'm relaxing."  I don't always have to feel like "I should be doing something else"
  
• more time on that activity means more improvement of my talent level
• more likely to find my "voice."  You can get good at something but to find your unique voice takes a commitment beyond just "working at it"
• I feel less confused about what I should be doing
• I feel less "scattered."  Five years ago this wouldn't have meant anything because I could work on lots of different things without feeling any problems.  But life changes, and now I feel that there is too much going on.
  

These positives are pretty powerful.  I especially like the part about finding my "voice" in whatever it is I'm doing.