Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Ways of getting across

I typically get pretty excited about songs with dance beats and bass lines. But this one song I just got too excited about last September. It was a little vindictive, a little disruptive, and it sang to me at that moment because, well, that's what I needed. Not all songs could have done that for me then, and that song might not do that ever again. I understood then what musicians do - they have to understand the field of people. They have to capture them at that moment in the most effective way possible, because music is based in a dimension of time that reeks of transience. 

Visual artists do something a little different, but they are fixated on vision. But what are our eyes and our visual cortices? Take Descartes' spectrum - no one has the same answer for when colors begin or end. I, for one, might never be able to perceive any craft in the way it was intended. If the back of my brain developed a little atypically, I might not even be able to see anything in a way I can even describe to other people.

Writing is different. It is so limited. One has to abide by language and its fickle structures which impose on the mind endless amounts of unnatural conflict, contrasts and equalities. One relies on only the words that humans have been unimaginative enough to invent, and not all humans at that. But with words I can move within a field of ideas that can escape body, time and space. But, then again, maybe I just haven't accessed the skill to do this with anything but words.

2 comments:

  1. i like what you say about the limitations of words. have you ever thought of a word in one language that doesn't exist in another, and then you sit there wondering how you would have described that "thing" within you had it not been for this other language you were fortunate enough to know?

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  2. exactly. and i'm sure there's a lot of thoughts and feelings i might never learn how to describe due to the limitations of english.

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