This complexity issue urges me to mention again the new book by Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal. There's much in this book that relates to our current and past conversations about neurology and mirror neurons, psychoanalysis, and social science. Gottschall relates all these topics to storytelling. I'll just mention his idea about description: He says that we will fill in context when given a bit of description. When authors over describe they effectively turn off the reader because what readers want to do, and are set up to do evolutionarily, is to imagine, to create a story. I've certainly tried to express the same idea (and I know it's not a new idea) when I say that we are compelled to invent a narrative, or story, for any experience, including visual experience of seemingly random or irrational or 'meaningless' images. Gottschall mentions an experiment where people are given utterly random, made up, nonsense sentences arranged in paragraph form. They will invent a story with these sentences. When I make a 'meaningless' abstract painting, I insist that viewers will create interpretations, stories, about it. I, too, do the same when I make the painting. My title suggests, purposely very vaguely, the story that came to me. I think the viewer will -- with sincere looking -- eventually create a story that converges with my own. we create similar meanings or narratives. I think the same thing occurs in fiction. The author needs to be careful not to over-describe or insist on a particular narrative. again, the engagement we love with stories is to how it enlivens our own imagination within the context provided by the author. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, August 13, 2012 11:26:35 AM Subject: Re: Complexity On Aug 12, 2012, at 7:07 PM, Michael Brady wrote: > By contrast, the New Testament parables are the polar opposite, the merest > sketches of a narrative with barely the sense of character, and thus are the > more memorable. Similarly, Athenian tragedies consisted of two or three actors > with masks and a chorus of commenators; the plays were more declaimed stories > with homilies than enacted narratives. The "characters" in Aesop's fables are comparable. They are for children. This is true of all "creative" writing where the thing was written to convey a lesson. By me, such stories, "peopled" by crudely whittled wooden pawns, are always unsatisfying. Note: though you'll notice occasional productions of plays from centuries ago, you never see any of the Athenian tragedies. They are3 very hard for the modern sensibility to tolerate. Creative works today -- for film, stage, or print -- are the products of would-be alchemists employing memory, imagination and sensibility. Memory and imagination abound, in countless people. The rarest of those three qualities is sensibility.
