Pause and Recapitulation
Maybe story telling needs to engage the reader.
Every story needs a logical arc (beginning, rising action, conflict, resolution
and a conclusion). How do you reconcile accounts of factual tidbits and poetic
license? The truth is stranger than fiction, yet a credible story cannot be
accurately offered by one still living his or her life. (Not by me anyway.)
What needs to happen, perhaps, to make things interesting is an artistic
interpretation. Consider a tapestry, or better still a collage, or maybe an
abstraction of sorts. Resisting the urge to wallow in second-guessing the
reasoning of the craft and compositional strategy, Jackson Pollock had no
trouble dripping paint onto a canvas on the floor. Maybe it is up to the critic
to determine meaning and value. Clement Greenberg is such a critic -- best
remembered for his promotion of abstract expressionism and among the first to
praise the work of Pollock.
All literature and art and history ultimately
intertwine. Insignificant as a single being is in the universe it seems expedient
to only glance. In the room, the women come and go speaking of Michelangelo (T.S.Elliot). Let
the lamp affix its beam. The only
emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. (Wallace Stevens) The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And
miles to go before I sleep (Robert Frost).
The ephemeral nature of being is belied as a single
day seems to take an eternity. Surely time spent waiting for a bus deserves a
level of quality too. A single person in pedestrian traffic crowding into
a subway car has comparable value to any other spec of a human on the planet. Well
then, the folly of my obsession to tell a story awaits critic, context and/or
interpretation. So be it. I do not create for critical or popular acclaim.
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