A Matter Of Interpretation.
Every time I go to the dentist I pass by these flowers. They’re plastic so they last but they’ve been there at least three years—I’ve written about it before—and someone regularly refreshes them, adding new ones and making other changes. There’s still no note, nothing to explain why they’re there, but I still assume they’re some kind of memorial. I still respect the privacy of whoever put them there. Even though it’s in a public spot their reasons for putting the flowers there are, I believe, personal, and should remain that way.
Still that got me thinking about how we interpret works of art. There’s a deep impulse to find meaning in things and it does seem obvious that if someone made something they had a purpose. At first I thought about how it applies to visual arts. Paintings and sculptures often get interpreted based on what we know about the artist and the time in which they lived, though titles can help too, and some artists are happy to explain their work. Others aren’t. Writing—both poetry and prose—can also have layers of meaning, and there are writers who are happy to talk about their inspiration, their craft, and whether there were deeper ideas they were trying to convey but didn’t state explicitly. And there are others who won’t do that. Cormac McCarthy regularly turned down often large fees to come and speak, saying anything readers wanted to know they could get from his books.
There’s an episode of Sanford & Son that opens with Fred and Lamont in a museum. The tour guide shows them an assemblage of metal pieces and asks, “What do you think the artist was trying to say?” Fred quips, “Stay off the freeway!”
Source: YouTube
It’s a joke and I still think it’s funny but even when I was a kid and saw that episode for the first time I thought, that could be right. My parents regularly took me to art museums, which I think is the source of my interest in art, and I learned pretty early that there’s no one way to interpret anything. Maybe that’s why I’ve remembered it and even as an adult think the assemblage could be interpreted as a statement about the perils of technology and the speed of modern life.
Fred is inspired to build an assemblage of his own, but it’s dismissed as worthless, not a “real” work of art, and he tears it down. Why? I wondered. As a kid I was often frustrated by sitcoms that seemed to get into something really interesting right as they hit the twenty-two minute mark and there’d be a quick, cheap resolution that reset everything just before the credits rolled. That still annoys me and I still ask questions like, why is an assemblage in a museum a valuable piece of art but one built by a junk dealer in a backyard worthless?
There’s no right answer to that question.
One of the nice things about a new coworker is they can remind me of things I’d forgotten or that I just take for granted but should still appreciate. The other day a new coworker dropped by my cubicle to ask a work question but instead asked something much more important: “Why do you have a big ball of string?”
The first camera I had was a hand-me-down. It was vintage, really, a kind with a strap that went around my neck and hung to my stomach so I’d have to look down into the viewfinder. I think it was some model of
We’re under a winter storm threat, with snow and prolonged freezing temperatures expected, and even though the skies are partly sunny right now the warning is already disrupting my schedule for the week ahead because we could get as much as three inches of snow. I know that sounds funny to people in places that are used to snow and, to be fair, Nashville does get enough snow that we should be used to it by now. Also there are a lot of people who’ve moved here from other places and they should have brought their snow experience with them. I even asked a coworker who’d moved here from Cleveland—Ohio, not Tennessee—how people in her hometown dealt with heavy snow.
Valentine’s Day is a time for giving flowers because nothing says love and affection like giving someone something that’s going to wilt in hours or days, or, if it’s a living plant, that they’ll have to take care of but at least isn’t dying. Roses are the most popular, especially red roses, because nothing says love and passion like something that’s ridiculously difficult to cultivate, doesn’t like to get its leaves wet, and, if not handled correctly, will stab you.
A coworker asked me where I went for lunch every day and then immediately apologized because she realized that, well, that’s an invasive question. She was just curious because every day at noon I pass by her cubicle with my journal. Not that I have anything to hide but I’d never ask someone where they go because they might have their reasons for wanting to keep that information private. I don’t know if anyone else is like me but when I’m off the clock I want to get as far away from work as possible, and when I’ve gone to lunch with people I work with I try to steer the conversations to pretty much anything but work. I have the advantage of working on a college campus and even when classes are in session there are a lot of empty classrooms or just lounge spaces where I can hide out for half an hour. I’ve worked in office buildings out in the middle of nowhere and felt trapped during lunch because there wasn’t anywhere to go. There was a break room and a dining area with vending machines but if I wanted to get out and walk, go somewhere truly away from work, my options were the parking lot or, just beyond that, the interstate.
