Meaning and Reading

Thinking deeply

I read something. It was talking about somebody by describing how they talked about things. It was saying that someone was talking about things in a way that placed their ultimate meaning behind their words, so while their words still had a direct meaning, there was also something between, behind or inside the words that people would find if they were trying to reach for it.

The thing I read was saying that this person’s words had, but also did not have, a meaning that made sense. It also said that this person’s words had impacted everybody with some dosage of the intended, ultimate meaning, even though not everybody would look for the hidden layers, nor know that they existed at all.

When I was reading, my face was getting a little warmer because the thing I read situated the person we’re both talking about within a specific political context, while describing the way that the person we’re talking about writes in a specific way, as though influenced, following or labeled in the tradition of a certain author.

The author that was allegedly being referenced by the person who was speaking esoterically was sometimes a contentious figure who often didn’t say what he meant but loaded the meaning elsewhere – but also allegedly, didn’t do this. The author of the thing I read said that the person who was talking with loaded meaning was what they called a “Lastname-ian” artist where the Last Name was of the contentious author who wrote about meaning in written texts as placed covertly to avoid censure.

I didn’t think that the idea of the so-called contentious author was supplied as a hard and fast rule – which is to say that the referenced author didn’t mean that texts were always written in this way, but that some of the most popular texts referenced from the time of the Classics were sometimes written in ways that loaded further or actual intended meaning behind the words themselves, to avoid critique in its most intolerable and unsafe forms. I have never read anything the author referenced in the thing I read wrote. I Googled a summary of and skimmed the abstracts and end pages of three articles on JSTOR – but I didn’t want to log in because I felt lazy.

The thing I was reading, the one I started this text talking about, was talking about the person’s esoteric words being placed in the context of right-wing prophesying. I got the feeling from the triumphant tone in the (two) authors words that they were happy about this interpretation. I think they thought it was the dominant and ultimately correct interpretation. I thought it was a surface level association that felt like an ink blot test, where you could see a butterfly or the current US President depending on the tilt of your head and what was inside it. I felt like my face was warm because I didn’t agree with the thing I was reading, I actually disagreed a lot.

I didn’t know how to disagree because I hadn’t read anything by the author who was referenced, nor had I studied textual analysis. I didn’t really know so much about the political landscape of any country besides the temperature I could feel from existing inside it. This only stopped me because I was afraid of the repercussions of ignorance, but I could also do the thing the allegedly contentious author referenced in the thing I read was doing. I could question why the thing I read felt internally contradictory and in fact I needed to because I couldn’t understand why I said ‘internally contradictory”, I just knew that’s what it was to me.

I think maybe I said it because I felt like the quote they chose was an example of the person speaking literally, and I didn’t feel like the meaning was so esoteric at all: the person was very obviously talking about the political temperament of a country triggering hyperindividualised, chronic rage, and a desire for wildness or to let all of those feelings out.

I didn’t know if I felt that the quote wasn’t esoteric because it was easy for me to see that meaning where it might not be for someone else, or if I had a point about the quote being pretty direct to begin with. I don’t know why it’s important to think like this but it is. The steps the authors presented as a logical, foregone conclusion really were not so. I meant that I could see how they associated the political ideology with the referenced author, and I could see how they associated the artist they spoke about with the contentious author’s ideas on writing, but I didn’t see how any of this made it so the artist was aligned with their own political thought.

The artist’s statement felt empirical and so perhaps politically agnostic. Her quote was talking about how everyone was framing their individual actions in reaction to an undercurrent of political tension. The artist whom the authors were talking about was not really speaking to the source of this tension, nor a resolution, but describing it.

Good artists are mirrors for the time we're in, so even though we make things from our own political perspectives, if we are good at what we make our makings reflect certain facets of our reality in ways as close to observation as possible. Mirrors absorb a lot of light, but reflect enough that you get a picture that you think is reality.

The author doesn’t always die, but it is always possible to kill the author to get what you want from what you are reading. Whether you feel like you can is what shapes what you get from the text. And you feel like you can or can’t kill the author because of who you are, and what you are willing to think.

This is why I think you need to see through a lot of perspectives to make conclusive statements on anything, but it is also why I think you need to keep making statements on things even if you don’t know what the statement is yet. The making of the statement is more interesting than the statement sometimes.

I didn’t totally understand why I was put off by the association of the artist and the authors preferred political ideology. I think its just because I felt like it wasn’t true and because the ideology felt bad, but that didn’t make it an interpretation that wasn’t true to the authors who wrote it. I think I was annoyed at the association of that artist with the ideology. I understood why I didn’t want to read the referenced author’s text (you know, the one that in the thing I’m reading made the person a LastName-ian artist), where he talked about persecution and how that affected the writing of certain texts. It was dangerous but also probably exactly as it should be to get my information about that referenced author from authors who wrote about him, but I didn’t want it to be so dangerous that I was lost, so I looked for a few different kinds of people talking about his text about texts.

I think this is not a pipe but it really looks like one so it takes a lot of energy, sometimes as much as it took to write this, to think of it as a painting of a pipe made in one specific way, by one kind of person, with all of the things that made that person who they were at that point in time.

That’s why you have to talk about things with yourself so much that you can talk about them as not being the things they are, but as what they meant to you on that one day you saw them and talked about them.

Meaning and Reading

Thinking deeply

References