A Confession

For those few of you who have been reading my posts, I have a confession to make. Not that it is something that has escaped your observation but merely to ease my own conscience: most of what I write is tripe. It is not to say that there is very little of honesty in what I have written but art by its very nature is mendacious and I have merely kept with the tradition and have experimented ceaselessly for effect and for fun. Most of my writings are stylistic eperiments and this is reflected in the arrangement of the pieces, a constant juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous ideas. This would be too little for me, though, and I have laboured to introduce in each piece stylistic variations. Again, merely interchanging one transparent style for another over the course of a work is not something particularly novel, and so I have mixed in flaws, absurdities and contradictions, both stylistic and contentual. And so these writings have been the presentation of a variety of styles content to be receptacles of the mere parsimonious contents that I have chosen to convey in them. The scatter-logical aspects and the innuendoes in what I have written best be as they are now: beneath the surface. The Book of the Winds was a major experiment I have been working on, some 500 pages of variations with simplistic themes but I have lost the patience that I had assumed rashly I would possess to complete it: it was to ooze a strange allusive style with the contents flawed, in both obvious and subtle ways. Now I do not think I can continue with it; but I doubt this will matter much or to many.

Before I continue on with my experiments, it will be useful to make a manifesto of my creed:

Art is mendacity. Its source is a truth, its product a lie; and its pupose, though, possibly, the elucidation of a truth, is, oftener, merely a self-serving expression of beauty.

The purpose of the artist is to confront a hard, cold truth and to produce a lie, an expression of the truth in a direct or a twisted manner. The lie may be prior or posterior to the truth or to the artist; the artist may be prior or posterior to the truth. The only constants are the confrontation and the alchemical production.

The purpose of the reader is to confront the lie and to get to the truth. The lie could be a straightforward representation of the truth but still is a lie insofar as it is not the truth.

Truth has no purpose. It just is.

To speak unphilosophically of it, in writing, the artist tries to express, through himself, an idea, a truth. When this expression is straightforward, in that, for the reader, understanding immediately follows perception, the art is simple and there is merely a giving of alms. When the expression is a challenge to the reader, in the process of attaining to the truth through an interpretation, there occurs an exchange as reader and artist meet somewhere in the middle, forcing them to conront new truths.

More unphilosophically, in the primitive novel, for example, the story is all-important and style is merely a vehicle, an accident. The purpose is merely narration. In a more refined novel, the style is given a greater role and the reader is challenged to understand. Taken to an extreme, however, when style becomes all-important, the novel forgets itself and becomes an experiment in linguistics or mathematics.

Anyway, this was supposed to follow the previous instalment of The Book of the Winds:

Interlude

"But grandfather, surely this is no interesting story that you are telling me! I mean it is so slow and so not fun! I think I will just go and play with the bears," little Ronda piped to Beron. The silver-haired Beron laughed and replied, "Of course it is not fun. It is not supposed to be. You wanted to grow up, not I; and this is the kind of story that grown-ups are told." "But grandfather, I thought being grown-up was fun. And I don't mind the story terribly except that nothing much happens in it," Ronda complained. "Oh a lot of things do happen in the story, my child. Only it is not all told. Grown-ups aren't like children. They don't want to be told everything directly. They like finding things out for themselves," Beron replied. "I like finding things for myself grandfather. Remember the little harp that you hid under the mistletoe in the front garden. I found it out myself," Ronda proudly reminded him. "Yes. And this is just like that. Only here you do not know you are looking for a harp. Much like life. Only a lot easier. If only people kept looking for things in books and left the world to itself. But what will be will be," and Beron put the pipe that smouldered near the bookstand back in his mouth, piping away another of his sad dreams. After a while, he called Ronda back to his side, "Come child, let us go on with the story and listen carefully now. Learn to hear more than what I tell you and to understand more than what you hear and see and you will be fine. And tie the loose ends of your pigtails by yourself like a little woman. You wouldn't want me to do it for you now, would you?"