One of the main points of TOSB is how very individually people apprehend shared visual components. I like such ideas and explanations that can never be fully reduced and grasped as they are shifting conceptual lenses.
Perhaps like watching a film where you can say what happened but couldn't really grasp what it was really about, or reading the words of a poem without layered appreciation of everything it implies, or again, all the ways once could look at and describe a painting short of eloquent interpretation - while approaching all these artistic clusters of codification, the ideas in TOSB do not all occur at once. Understanding comes in waves, perhaps overlapping waves. Our point of understanding may vary, may recede somewhat, or be superseded by other opposing or affirming waves.
The tide of understanding does come in, creeps in sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes counter intuitively, and sometimes with an overwhelming rush. As with understanding, so with seeing, and TOSB often corresponds with my own thinking and has helped me to articulate my own thoughts in this area. Some of these thoughts are nurtured since childhood, as children do, wondering about the nature of things, which grows into adult research and a career in the arts if still retaining such basic fascination with issues.
And so yet again I read this book, and it is again a different book, a half-remembered film whose details I recall as they recur. I also remembered reading parts before, thinking about the ideas, where my own thoughts took me and sometimes what I did with those ideas. Sometimes I also remember the flavours of particular times and days when I read those pages before and held this book in different spaces.
The waves come in, some familiar, some new, some more complex, and some I didn't particularly notice before. Some of the concepts in this book work like watching a TV documentary explaining some scientific concept, with demonstrations of two scientists, one on a train, and they are both observing the same event, the same point in time, and yet each alters it by their point of observation. You can see it happen before your eyes, you can relate it back in a narrative form, describe it and get it. and yet, that understanding wavers amongst fields of whatever maths and science gleaned in life, and imagination, and fiction, and perhaps beliefs and personal theories.
I take from TOSB mainly a sideways revelation from the central point, or rather, I am mostly interested and fascinated with a by product, which is, to take further from Nietzsche, that there are no facts, only interpretations. I came across this concept only fairly recently, but truer, I think I only really noticed it recently, because it seems familiar. Recently it came crashing more into my thinking with a clarity of truth. I can relate and attach much of my own thinking, my conclusions, and the intention of my artwork to this - no facts, only interpretations.
31st March 2014
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