BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
stop making sense/stop making sense
Look, I get it. We want things to happen for a reason and we want to be able to find meaning in things that surprise our senses.
Let’s blame this in part on American curricula. Exhausted high school teachers are given ancient pieces of art and told they have to teach it to hormone-bathed young people. So we repeat over and over “a metaphor is when you say one thing but mean something else” and “a simile is a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as.’” As if art interpretation is a field guide for identifying different salamanders. And once we “get” it, once we figure out we have identified a blue-spotted salamander, our only reward is having figured it out.
I’m not saying symbolism isn’t real, but I don’t think art is a sudoku puzzle. But I used to think that!
As a younger human, I thought that my teachers would be super impressed with me if I could perfectly decode the mysterious secret meaning in our readings. I thought that’s what they wanted. I was interested in things like Don McClean’s “American Pie” where there were allegedly whole college courses about all the references in the song and explaining them totally. “Oh, when he says ‘The Jester’ he means Bob Dylan, so that’s why he says that.” Well then why don’t we just cut out the middle man and have the song go “When the Bob Dylan sang with the Pete Seger and Joan Baez in a similar jacket that James Dean wore”?
Completing a sudoku gives real pleasure after all.
I was in a poetry class and we were reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and I was like “what in the hell is this?” I couldn’t find an in into the poem but I was told it was very famous and important so I TRIED HARD. And I decided that it was a poem about World War I and that every image represented some reference to an aspect of World War I (the “yellow fog” was obviously mustard gas, etc…).
Rereading the poem now, it’s, you know, fine. It’s fine! I have learned that life is short enough and poetry is profuse enough that I don’t have to like something because a lot of other people do. And that I don’t have to “solve” the puzzles of symbolism for their own sake.
Now, if you will, watch the “Meals on Wheels/Creamed Corn” clip from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks show:
What the hell is happening? Well let’s break it down:
Lara Flynn Boyle represents innocence. The old woman represents decay. The young man would represent rebirth but because he’s in a tuxedo we know him to be the façade of decadence. And the creamed corn represents man, capriciously batted around from plate to hand to obscurity, hearing the mermaids singing each to each.
Jk! I don’t know what it means but I love it. (Also, the grandson is played by David Lynch’s actual son, which, once you know, is like “no duh”).
Now, watch the “Lil” clip from the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me:
The Twin Peaks movie came out after the first run of the show and I am pretty sure what this scene MEANS is everything I am talking about here: our very normal desire to ascribe one-to-one meaning to the things we observe that perplex. David Lynch probably got tired of people trying to do that to his stuff. Can’t tell you about that blue rose tho.
I remember seeing that scene with Lil when I was 12 and being thoroughly unsettled and when Chris Isaak “explains” what she “means,” I did not feel any less unsettled. And then I avoided Twin Peaks until I was in my 30s, when I was ready to be unsettled on purpose.
Does it help to know that when Gulliver in his Travels is peeing out the fire in the Lilliputian queen’s palace that that is a reference to when Jonathan Swift angered Queen Anne by satirizing the church in his Tale of a Tub? Sure! But it’s still funny without that knowledge. I mean, to me. You read it! Report back.
So why do we say things but mean other things? Why can’t we just say what we mean?
Stephen Dobyns in Best Words, Best Order discusses how metaphors usually have an image half and reference half, and sometimes those halves are hard to pin down (for him, mystery is good but vagueness is bad). Lynda Barry talks about an entire image world that exists within our own, that that world is where art (and other things) comes from, and being able to traverse from one world to the other can feel all kinds of ways.
But feeling, I think, is the point. Being able to use your own brain and heart and experiences to safely feel feelings is pleasure, is survival, is growing the soul. Is art. I’m an atheist, but I feel like our soul, as the part of ourselves that moves between the image world and this one, is real. It’s just not tangible. It’s a referent that will forever be unnamed. We are a metaphor for our souls.
Whatever any art means, we are the ones who create that meaning for ourselves. The artist gives us bones and we fill them with our meat.1
What does it mean? It means you. You are the means. What do you mean?
Here’re some poetry prompts - the first two model poems have images that, to me, do not have clear referents. The third model poem I feel has a fairly obvious referent. A sexy one!
Read Richard Brautigan - "The Pumpkin Tide” and “A Boat”
Write ten concrete images unrelated to each other
Pick one and tell me about it
Read Natalie Diaz’s "I Watch Her Eat the Apple”
List ten things you love to do
Pick one - what object do you associate with that thing you love?
Write about that object
Bonus track “Kinkan Shonen” WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
Join us for another live Zoom workshop this Thursday at 8PM US CST. Register here for that hot link.
Grow up!