> If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
A device of painting: when you paint a scene with a reflection, the reflected image is always duller, less bright or brilliant than the actual object (because some of the light penetrates into the water or glass of the mirror and is not reflected back at you). Written descriptions of one's reaction to a painting or sculpture are not the same as the reactions. They are like the reflections that are duller than the things that make the reflections. If you want to know how I felt when I saw X, I will tell you to stand in front of X and look at it. But even then, that will be a faint approximation of how I felt because you do not have the same store of experiences, memories, images, ideas, etc., that I do. William has often made such an observation. I think sometimes these discussions lose sight of the fact that what we write embodies our verbal reconstructions of ideas--and those ideas can be anything, from a completely fanciful story about a dog and airplane and taffy to the memory of being transfixed by a painting or overwhelmed by a play or a tender or dreadful event you witnessed. All of the ideas that we write about are equally ideas: they aren't the actual first experience, but memories of them, and the descriptions we write are how we reduce those ideas--again, not the original experiences--into words concatenated into sentences and revealed piecemeal in the time it takes to read the text. The human mind does several things very well; pattern recognition is one of them. We recognize not only the patterns of visual things we see, or tactile things, or sounds, but also of ideas, so that we can categorize memories and organize them in our minds by various criteria. This abstracting of categorical qualities can perhaps seduce us into thinking that the mental constructs of our categories are somehow actually present in the works and in the experiences of them, when the only things we can point to are the individual works and the specific experiences we had. And again, all of that is memory, so we often talk about memories as proxies of the original event. I am coming more and more around to a view probably similar to Cheerskep's. Communications comes down to saying to someone, "There, that's what I have to say. What does that make you think of?" If you ask me what I think of, say, Motherwell's paintings, I might say, "Isn't that a great picture. Here, look at it." (As a matter of fact, I saw on a news website yesterday a headline about Obama's nuclear policy. Illustrating it was a picture of one of Johns' Flags. All I could think of was how much I liked that painting, and how meticulous he was in replicating the colors, the regular 5-pointed stars in the field, the 6x8 array of stars, the straight stripes, and the texture of the encaustic that was still visible. Beyond that, I can't describe more, even though I have no trouble expressing ideas in writing, because expressing how I felt in writing is not the same thing as how I felt. In fact, I'd probably resort to what I just did right now, mentioning specific parts of the painting as a way to pointing to things that provoke my feelings.) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
