IS THE WALLABY “BEHIND” THE TREE?
Or, are there too many artists in the world?
This morning I was trying to remember the name of an artist whose piece I loved in the Tate Modern, and I caught myself thinking, “There are too many artists in the world!” Which reminded me that when I was first taking myself seriously as a writer, I’d look at my bookshelves and think, “There are too many books in the world. Why do we need another?” Which was very dispiriting.
But I went ahead and wrote books anyway. Something drove me hard enough to focus not on what the world needed, but on what I needed—though I did hope that individual people in the world might somehow benefit from reading my stories.
So, if there are too many creative people in the world, what should we have instead? More financial professionals? (Creative though some of them are.) More cops and soldiers? No, please, give me a world chock-a-block with artists and writers!
In that case, why think a thought like that? It wasn’t intentional because thoughts aren’t—they’re like clouds drifting across your mental landscape. You can stop and stare at one and think, hmm, that means rain, or it means bad luck, or it means God is up in heaven making tea, but the cloud isn’t making that meaning, you are. You don’t have to make the thought mean anything any more than you make the cloud mean anything.
My frustration generated the thought. “Too many artists in the world” just means too many for me to remember and appreciate and know about. Too many that are extraordinary, therefore too many for me to make a judgmental totem pole. The problem isn’t with the artists or the numbers or the size of the world or what feels like the shrinking bandwidth of my brain, but with the point of view—the idea that my personal perspective on the world has any validity, even to myself.
Here is a fascinating factoid, which I haven’t researched because I don’t want to discover it’s not true. (Sticking to my own perspective here, I know. Justification: as we say in Session 10 of Write What You Don’t Know, contradiction is at the heart of most good scenes or characters or stories.) In the Aboriginal Australian language (maybe there are more than one, I’m out of my depth here), there are no words for “behind,” “in front of,” and other location words that depend on a viewer’s perspective. So you wouldn’t say, “The wallaby is behind the tree”; you’d say, “The wallaby is north of the tree.” I interpret this as the possibility of a culture with no conception of subjective reality, at least as far as the physical world goes. The wallaby is only behind the tree from the speaker’s perspective; objectively, it’s in its own independent relationship to the tree, which in this case is north/south.
Maybe you’re wondering how the people who use this language are so perfectly attuned to the directions that they instantly know the location of the wallaby, just as quickly as we would know it’s “behind” the tree. So here is the next fascinating factoid which I haven’t researched: the Aboriginal Australians smear an iron-rich mud on their bodies which responds molecularly to the magnetism of the poles, and thus they can feel the cardinal directions through their skin.
If you are in any way knowledgeable about Aboriginal culture, please correct me or tell me more about this!
Anyway, myth or fact, this gave me a perspective on my own perspective on the world: that even in casual thought and conversation, I unconsciously make myself the axis. Perhaps this is unavoidable. It’s just not objectively the case.
Since coming up with the concept of “write what you don’t know,” I’ve begun to notice more and more ways in which we really don’t know much of what we think we know. (If any. Discuss.) Is the shrinking of the ego a good thing for a writer? I can’t help but feel that it is. At least, I feel it’s a good thing for mental health.
PS - The artist whose name wouldn’t come to me is Taryn Simon. Here’s a photo of her installation, “A Living Man Declared Dead.” It’s impossible to convey the power of the piece in photos.
