Images of Lightness

I’m just going to include images I think of as light. Some of these got used in the blox, some didn’t. I don’t know where most of them originated, they were just found online. Here they are: (they can be clicked on to get bigger images)

Using Cornell To get Lighter

So, I turned toward Blair to inform me of how Cornell worked with his boxes. The key thing that gets communicated here is that the box isn’t only going to reflect the actual tutor text (The Thief of Always) but also myself. That’s one of the things that Cornell was really noted for: his constant self scrutiny, and how the thing he was adapting (or reacting to) made him feel. Those things were always reflected in his boxes.

So, the process of making a box is a process of self-reflection, in which you analyze why something made you feel the way it did. So, what about those two lines that I’m turning into a blox got me? What affect did they have, and why did they get that response? This is the deep end of the pool sort of thinking here. Seriously, the unexamined life is filled with exciting mysteries, but to actually sit down and examine carefully why you reacted the way you did to something is pretty taxing.

So I’m going to trot out my two lines again:

There was debris in the air, of course: petals and leaves, dust and ash. They fell like a dream rain, though their fall marked the end of a dream.

I’ve got to say, others reading must be getting well and truly sick of those lines. I’m not though. I still enjoy them, every single time I flip open that little book to type them out again which I’ve done now four times (one would think I’d just copy and paste them, but I think I’m getting something good from looking them up again and again).

Those lines communicate to me something magical. It’s something that you experienced, and is ending. It’s melancholy (which is just sadness that has taken on lightness), and it makes me feel a little sad, if just a little joyful at having experienced the moment at all. I find it noteworthy that we include not just living things in our list of things falling (petals and leaves), but also dust and ashes, which brings to mind “Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes” of an English burial service.

Cornell tells me to run with these things in my box. He would communicate this understanding, this emotional understanding in his box, and I’m going to use it in my Blox.

The Light Adaptation

My adapting The Thief of Always to a visual medium was helped along by Seger’s The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film. So, what is light in the original work? Well I covered that here, so instead I’m going to focus on what aspect of lightness I wanted my new creation, my blox, to communicate. I clearly had a huge number of choices as far as which aspect I was going to try to communicate, but I zeroed in on one image in particular (that I also commented on in my Experience of Lightness post). It was this pithy little two line passage:

There was debris in the air, of course: petals and leaves, dust and ash. The fell like a dream rain, though their fall marked the end of the dream.

I remember reading that as a kid. I don’t recall how I reacted. But I tell you, when I read that as the individual I am now, it almost bowled me over. It’s such a strong visual image, and I can imagine it so clearly, that I almost can’t resist but to adapt it. That’s one of the things that Seger tells us to do: Find something that is usable. She, of course, is talking about adapting something to film, while my interest is merely adapting it into a  collage. Man oh man, did I find something usable in this particular line. It even communicates a theme to us (which is another instruction that Seger informs us of: find the themes of the work and determine which are appropriate).

Those two lines are what I wanted to build my image around. I wanted to communicate the lightness that occurred when reading those lines, when visualizing this dream rain. I will unabashedly say that I love those lines. In the course of this project alone I’ve read them about a half a million times, and each time, it gets a reaction. I feel the lightness of leaving something behind, something wonderful and terrible all at once. Sure, when you were experiencing it your thoughts and feelings were different, but in leaving that little bit behind, a portion of life has closed and ended, in the softest way possible.

So taking those tidbits that Seger provided, I moved forward in adapting those two lines, and the feeling of those two lines. However, Seger provided a workbook like manual, so in order to convert the feeling I wanted, I would need to look to Lindsay Blair’s Joesph Cornell’s Vision of a Spiritual Order.

The Lightness of Experience

I find lightness the easiest of Calvino’s qualities to find in The Thief of Always. The simple fact is that it’s a book written for children, so all the obfuscating choices that are made for literature for adult consumption aren’t made here. The language is simple and direct, but that by no means implies that it isn’t rich with symbolism and meaning. Take, for instance this passage at the beginning of the book:

The Great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter.

This passage is communicating to us the ennui that the character feels, but through metaphor it has lightened the very concept of boredom (not a small task). It’s taken the sting out of boredom (for us) by giving us a reference, by making it a character inof itself. The great beast of February (and I assure you, I’ve met it, though not always in the month it’s named for) is lighter than that actual statement of fact we could derive from this: It is February, and Harvey Swick isn’t sure that February will ever end.

However, I’m getting all excited and I haven’t even really delved into the area I really wanted to talk about. The thing that I found most light about this particular work (and there are a variety of areas to choose from, the language itself, the taught plot, the constant appearance of flying, wind, and flowers, the magical occurrences), is the way that things are described. Calvino informs us that one of the methods of lightness is to dissolve the solidity of the world. There is another passage that comes from The Thief of Always that does this, and also is light in one of the three ways that things can be light (per Calvino). I’m going to tell you the passage, and then let you guess at which of the three senses it is light; the three senses of lightness are: 1)the lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless until the meaning itself takes on the same consistency, 2)there is the narration of train of thought in which subtle elements are at work or any description that involves a high degree of abstraction, 3)and there is a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value. Here’s the passage:

There was debris in the air, of course: petals and leaves, dust and ash. They fell like a dream rain, though their fall marked the end of a dream.

So, in what way was that light? It’s actually a trick question, because the way in which it is light is totally dependent on the person reading it. So my answer won’t match yours. I personally found it light in the second sense, though I would be happy to argue that it manages to hit all three senses of lightness in just two lines.

I really think that a large part of the lightness of this text has to do with the fact that it’s for children. Children are light in the sense that they don’t yet have the weight of living that adults have. Because of this, most of their literature is lighter than that of adults. When we sit down to write something for an adult as opposed to a child, we worry about including all the niggling things that adults want to know about, all the rich and varied descriptions that are such a pleasure to read, but that add weight to the work. With children, the aim is instead to communicate something that a child will understand and enjoy, so the writer needs to make sure that they are communicating in a method children will understand. They have to unburden their writing of the pretensions of being an adult.

An excellent example of lightness in children’s lit. is Peter Pan. Not the Disney movie, the book by J.M. Barrie. Hell, I’ll let the image that comes from the book and this quote show this for itself:

“‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, ‘I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.'” 

I kind of got away from myself there, but I think my point stands. Anyway, The Thief of Always is bursting with lightness, in the language, the scenes described, the fact it’s children literature, all of these things combine together to make the work of a very rarefied consistency.

A Light little Emblem

Finally, my emblem for lightness is going to be lint. Lint is physically light, it is usually transparent (because it’s surface is interrupted), and it is a compression of the fibers and such left behind in your pockets. Those left behind pieces are going to give us information about what you’ve done and where you’ve been, all in a very small ball (unless you haven’t changed the lint filter in your washer lately).

It won’t always be interesting, but it will give us a clear view of what sorts of clothes you wear and what sorts of things you put into your pockets. Lint is the debris of our travels, much as the images of Rice were debris.

It’s not the noblest of emblems one could ask for, but it encapsulates how I view lightness, and how these things interact to convey to us this view.

An Analogy for Lightness (or, a Snapshot)

Rice is the compression of an experience. Data compression is the act of encoding information to use fewer bits than the original representation. So data compression is my analogy for lightness when held up against Rice. Data compression reduces the amount of resources required to contain a file. Rice reduced the visits of several people into a few select poems and images, and those poems even used only a few lines of their actual experience.

It’s all tied together in compression, in the reduction of the amount of data conveyed to us, paring it all down to the core idea of the work. Or reducing the size of a file to increase the amount of room on our hard drive.

The Lightness of Design

My graphic for lightness is transparency. As a social value transparency suggests clarity and directness, and only becomes an active design element when it’s value is between zero and 100%. It is light in that it allows us to build complexity and to combine and contrast ideas, much as Rice did.

The actual act of making something more transparent is reducing it’s physicality on the page, or making it lighter. When we make it more opaque, we are increasing the physicality of the element, and making it contain more weight on the page. Rice was transparent in that it reduced the opaqueness of another persons views, distilling them down into clear and laconic poems and images.

A light bit of E-Lit

With this thought in mind, I plunged into the e-literature volume and emerged with Rice by geinwate clutched firmly between my teeth. Rice takes the experience of being a tourist in Vietnam and compresses it down into sixteen images which are linked to poems. I found it interesting that the images used to represent these memories was debris, things that are normally discarded or unwanted.

Rice gives us a transparent view into the thoughts and emotions of these tourists, and what informed their experiences within the country. This piece is a distillation of their experience. It is light in that it gives us the core of the experience (while missing none of the subtleties) and it managed to give differing viewpoints on the experience all at the same time. Rice seemed to float on by. The images were appealing and interesting, and the poems were (usually) enjoyable and concise. They were almost all train of thought narrations of how the person saw Vietnam. I found it pleasing that the images gave way to ephemeral thoughts, and how the views and ideas of the travelers were clear and concise.

 

Calvino’s Lightness

Calvino tells us that in order to escape the unbearable weight of being, we must change our approach and look at life with different logic and fresh methods of cognition and verification. So lightness is about escaping the constraints of our normal point of view. He also tells us that a work of literature can be light in three different senses: 1) lightness can be gained by lightening the language of a work until the meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, 2) in narrative trains of thought or psychological processes in which subtle and imperceptible elements are at work or any description with a high degree of abstraction, and finally there is a visual image of lightness that acquires an emblematic value.

When I considered lightness and what I had been told about it, I found that the sense that most resonated with my experience was when a work had a narrative train of thought in which subtle and imperceptible elements were at work, or if there was a high degree of abstraction. I view lightness almost as a compression of information, a compression in which things are lost, but those things were never important anyway. The core functionality of the work remains the same. When I think of literature in this way, I tend to think of mobile phone novels, in which space is at a premium and so the core of the story must be transmitted by text message. That’s lightness.