Dreams and art and theory and boredom and come to a reading on Saturday!
On Saturday I’ll be reading for a new series at Around the Coyote called RE:Action, where writers are shown an artist’s visual work in order to write what the piece first makes them think of. Then, at the opening, there’s a reading of those responses (and also art and wine and the general fabulousness that comes with attending swanky gallery openings).
The artist I’ll be reacting (RE:Acting) to is Haseeb Ahmed. There’s information about him here, as well as the piece of his that I wrote about: it has the same phrase in two different languages—one at the top and one at the bottom—connected by a messy triangular web of lines.
It’s interesting because I’m used to writing off of very concrete things—a definite image, or line of dialogue—so it was this whole other mental process for me to look abstractly at a piece of art, decide on an overall significance for me as an audience to that art, and then translate that significance into my own experience in order to find the story I wanted to tell.
What I eventually came up with was distorted communication: how someone says one thing and it’s interpreted as something else based on the different connotations both parties have. I like the idea because it’s relative to greater world issues, but also to everyone’s day-to-day situation. Like, one person says “I love you,” but to them the word “love” is really happy and to the person they’re saying it to, it’s really scary. The same with “Girlfriend,” or “boyfriend” or “mine” or “Holy Land” or “marriage” or “no” or “friend,” etc. etc. and all this anger and confusion happens because people either don’t bother to explain themselves, or are really emotional in their explanations so they’re not listening to each other anyhow.
Am I making ANY sense? This is why I write stories and not theory: because when I get into the theory I realize halfway through my big heavy speech that even I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore. Like last night I had this really crazy dream—
which is either connected to school starting this week or just general hormone-y-ness (probably the latter. My dreams have been nutty lately, like Monday I had one where I was in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and I was so super pregnant that I couldn’t even walk so they just had a folding chair in the center of the stage and I sat through the entire show and said stuff occasionally which was really boring ‘cause part of the fun of that show is all the jumping around. So anyhow, one of the thirty plays they did was called NAME MEGAN’S KID and the audience got to vote. They decided on Bootsie. Bootsie Jobson)
—in which someone said, “I’m going to write something truly original!” and then, in the dream, I had this lengthy discussion with myself—
‘cause no one else was there to discuss anything with, I don’t even know who said the whole “going to write something original” thing to begin with, unless it was my subconscious or something, to which I’d say, “Shut UP, Subconscious!” because I get really bored with theoretical discussions when there’s so much real stuff going on (I’m thinking of the time a friend said, “I had the great conversation today! We talked about the theory of penetration!” and I was like, “penetration is a theory?”) and furthermore, if I happen to be living in a barn and can’t find any real stuff, my imagination’ll do me just fine, thank you—SO. You can see how having a dream in which I talked theory all night was really annoying and I woke up kind of irritated and would really like a double espresso
—about whether or not writing something original is even POSSIBLE. I broke down the differences in originality of content and form and structure and the whole time I was talking I’m going BOOOOO-RRRRING in the back of my head and then I decided I should just wake up already and do the Yoga-for-Pregnant-Ladies DVD ‘cause at least that’s somewhat interesting. And the lady has a Bristish accent. Which is always fun at six a.m.
And what were we talking about?
Oh yes. This.