The Sound and The Fury, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, Life of Pi, King Lear, the Iliad, the Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Il Canzoniere... I have stronger impressions and memories of writings than anything produced by Michelangelo, Matisse, Picasso, Warhol, Dali, Da Vinci... I'm sure there are multiple reasons for this, not least of which is I've been asked to consider literature more closely and intensely than any artwork (read: art history exams = base regurgitation).
I started with a shoe as my object of study and arrived at the material idea of a ship and the immaterial idea of afterlife. Shoe, top-sider, boats, "Of shoes--and ships--and ceiling wax--of cabbages--and kings--", Egyptian/Minoan/Norse funerary barques, Achaean ships/nostos/return home, Charon the ferryman, Elysian fields/Field of Reeds, Tolkien's Grey Havens... Shoe, shoe motif, Slaughterhouse-Five (wooden clogs, silver Cinderella boots, blue and ivory barefoot, death) hull/heel/heal...
The physical construct of a shoe does resemble that of a ship: laces and rigging, grommets and portholes, etc. Lingual coincidences, however, are still more intriguing to me -- shoes that transport soles and ships that transport souls. Maybe I'm waiting for my visual literacy to catch up with my verbal fluency. I have no idea what our exercises are leading to, but I'm doing my best to keep an open mind to the lack of an overt destination.
ROS: What are you playing at?
GUIL: Words, words. They're all we have to go on.
ROS: Shouldn't we be doing something -- constructive?
PLAYER: You are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. That’s enough.
GUIL: No–-it is not enough. To be told so little-–to such an end-–and still, finally, to be denied an explanation–---Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
I went on the spontaneous (and now well-documented) Volterra trip -- the motivation for which I can safely say was personally entirely vampire-unrelated -- but my camera batteries tragically gave up the ghost by the time we arrived at the first bus stop. I was able to use other's cameras here and there but left with only one very quick sketch of the panoramic view from the old Etruscan walls. (Which might be just as well since it seemed insulting to the view to subject it to the confines of a four-sided frame.) On those walls, we all experienced that phenomenon discussed at the Via Nuova gallery in which we respond to "real" images (i.e. coverage of Sept. 11, or in our case, a beautiful Tuscan countryside) with, "This can't be real," because we're daily bombarded by tons images (Hollywood films with gratuitous explosions and those €0.50 picturesque postcards). And so, we question the worth of images and one's capacity to create them.
"Millions of people can draw. Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way."
"Or a laugh."--Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
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