Rocks

Here are a few of the rocks in my life. The handsomely mustached rock (his name is Shanely) is currently traveling abroad with my friend in Europe. This picture shows him on a bridge in a national park in Ireland. I occasionally like to paint rocks and give them away or hide them (sometimes by grocery stores or parks, etc). If you think this sounds like an odd way to spend time, I would have to agree. But I would also encourage you to try it.

The second picture shows the two rocks on my window sill. I think the big orangish fellow might be from a bike trip I took with my family? But I don’t actually remember. He ended up coming with me to college by default as he happened to be sitting on my nightstand when I was packing. The second rock is another one I painted. The shadow in the picture almost hides it, but I also scrawled a little quote that seemed deep at the time.

I suppose I should relate all of this to what we’ve been reading.

I feel that I have made these (among other) rocks sacred by associating them with a particular memory, and/or bestowing a name. Actually, the most important and memorable rocks have all been “named” by either title (Shanely) or quote. Similar to Scholes Destry-Scholes’ marbles, I have conferred sacramental importance upon meaningless objects through words. Why would I do this? Why would Vera insist upon methodically associating an arbitrary word with its respective marble? She admits that “she had no hope of ever understanding the system. But by process of elimination, she wondered whether it would be possible to fix a name to each marble. She did believe each had had one name and one only” (203). Vera has no hope of understanding the system yet she retains faith that the system exists; that the system holds meaning and order and is not arbitrary. Vera’s passion to order words into names for the marbles holds meaning regardless of the words’ “correct” alignment with the original order. The system holds meaning because Vera has constructed her own order.

Why would I collect meaningless objects and paint and/or name them? Am I looking for an element of the sacred to enter my life? Do I have to enforce order on random nature to lend meaning to my existence?

Or do I just like painting mustaches?

Mosaics

Byatt opens the novel with this quote: “These similitudes are charming and entertaining, and who does not enjoy playing with analogies?” (Goethe).  Why play with analogy? Why not use a direct comparison to relate similarities? Would this not be the most efficient use of words and time? The answer seems to always be a variation of: because art can contain greater truth than reality alone. Somehow, out of a mishmash conglomerate of lies, distorted experience, stolen ideas and facts we can derive “greater truth” as well as that enigmatic “essence”. How is this possible?

After our last class discussion and reading Bizz’s blog, I went back to look at the passage about mosaics. Nanson writes that the great makers raided previous art for tesserae to rework into new images, to catch “different light at different angles” and make “transparent what had been a brilliant reflective surface”. Mosaics then are a collection of thoughts and perceptions (both the maker and past makers’) rearranged—ordered—in a way that allows what had previously been reflected through the transparent finished piece. In other words, mosaics crafters seem to be employing a forced order through the use of glue and a hammer—to create greater meaning from random shards of glass. This passage reminded me of our discussions about imposing rather than discovering. All writing is essentially about the writer’s experience, just as a reader (especially in the initial stages of reading) finds it is easier to see connections to his own life before delving into the actual essence of the work. Maybe works of art always are constantly in transition from mirror mosaics to transparency, to make what was previously impenetrable with the face of our own image clear. That somehow, through the raiding of the “great makers” thoughts and careful gathering of perceptions, we can force order upon this chaos of gathered experience and derive a greater truth. However, as the line referring to “rage” in Key West suggests, we compromise something in the end. We destroy for order. To fit a mosaic into a new image, we must pull shards out of their original context, take the hammer and damage glass.  

However, seeing as how all glass’s form and substance is originally inspired by Nature and crafted from bits of melted sand, it’s pretty miraculous that it exists at all.

Search for Meaning

“Maybe this so-dreadfully desired, so elaborate real self was an absence of self, a freely-moving, flickering flame of knowledge and language, which should not be forced, or frozen, into any of the gestures required by the social touches and approaches through which most people discover themselves through others?” (101).

Ibsen’s obsession with his real self is in stark contrast with Nanson’s frequent proclamations of disinterest in himself. In one of his brief reflections on childhood, Nanson states that he was almost put off from his vocation by the urging of teachers who “assured me I would ‘discover myself’ by reading, that I would ‘understand myself’ by ‘identifying’” (117).  Instead, Nanson insists that true literary fanatics are looking for “anything but a mirror—for an escape route, for an expanding horizon” (117). After describing literature’s more fantastical incarnations, he later regards the function of literature in the search for meaning almost as an afterthought. It’s strange that Nanson poses the functions in this order; escape before meaning, “unimaginable monstrosities” before comprehension and order.

Ibsen and Nanson seem to embody two opposing methods in a similar separate search for meaning. While Ibsen’s desire is to be (and by extension, understand?) himself, he seems only to gain understanding and control over the fictional characters he manipulates in plays. In contrast, Nanson claims disinterest in himself and desires escape through literature, yet he finishes his research on DS with a more complete knowledge of his own life. This pattern of attainment of knowledge through distance from what we desire to judge is reminiscent of the quote Sarah discussed: “the human being is in the spiritual sense a long sighted creature” (100).  

A Composite of Thoughts

“There are very few human truths and infinite variations on them…we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend—not infinitely, but violently, but giddily—the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover…we put a whole lifetime…to discovering what these things mean for us—dark, shadows” (274).

Nanson’s two lovers seem to embody the two (opposing?) forces he attempts to balance throughout the novel: robust Fulla with her knowledge of bee life representing the pursuits of science and the tangibility of “things” while Vera, isolated and obsessive, represents the arts in her attempts to capture the delicate and morbid “inner life” of humanity. But I’ve been imposing…Fulla is perhaps as isolated and obsessive as her darker counterpart. Perhaps these qualities were less apparent (to me) because I subscribe to the stereotype of the “haunted” artist in books…as well as life, and life reflected in art.

Byatt’s interesting play on words on page 205 (“a writer’s task is essentially to see, not to mirror”) brings to mind the double meaning of the word “mirror”—to mimic another or look at oneself. This double meaning seems to sum up the role of the writer/artist in this novel. Through mimicking DS in the role of the biographer, Nanson is able to look at or into himself; in writing and conducting research about another’s life, he is looking into his own in a way unparalleled by his days as a post-modernist scholar. “I am not very good at finding out who Scholes Destry-Scholes was because I am not very interested in finding out who I am” (pg 118). It is in the process of writing about another's life that his own experience becomes the focal point…however, Scholes Destry-Scholes cyclical and repetitive name in itself seems to serve as a metaphor for the futile search for an “end”: there is no end in the acquirement of knowledge, just as it is impossible to fully know and understand one’s true self (if there is such a thing).

On a side note, I’ve started counting the white Subaru Outbacks I encounter in Bozeman and am a little creeped out by how many “find” me when I start imposing.