an aesthetic stance
Life presents itself as a series of shimmering forms. Coffee rings and red cherries on oatmeal. Orange sunsets against a freeway overpass. Graffiti on palm trees.
You could decide not to view these things aesthetically. You could decide not to interpret. Sometimes a rose is just a rose. But a failure to imagine that these glittering forms might imply anything except themselves leads to a cold nihilism, or senseless materialism.
The most important things I learned in school were the most seemingly pointless. I did not see the use of culling novels for symbols. But interpreting novels allowed me to interpret the finest art, which is life. It provided me an aesthetic stance.
The opposite of the aesthetic stance is to assert that, like a flippant ninth grader in English class, a bowl of oatmeal is simply a bowl of oatmeal. The author meant nothing by it. There exists nothing except a glittering parade of bowls of oatmeal. From this stance, it makes sense to imagine the task of life is simply to acquire more oatmeal, tastier oatmeal, oatmeal topped with gold flakes, oatmeal eaten at the beach and oatmeal eaten from the finest porcelain. This is fine and good. Ceramics can be gorgeous. Oatmeal is delicious. I would like to be at the beach right now, too.
But from an aesthetic stance, this is not enough. It misses the obvious. Life speaks in symbolism and foreshadowing. On the street, the sword-shaped leaves of a yucca tremble in the wind. It is clear they are moved by meanings. The wind, the unseen movement that surrounds all characters, like plot, brushes against my cheek. Sitting and looking, at birds coasting in the sun and at leaves in the wind, at the movements of the world, one cannot help but get the sense that things are terribly, incandescently significant.
Interpretation does not deny this obvious fact that things are lit by something. At times, one feels a certainty that some things are meaningful. Interpretation, unlike nihilism, does not deny the obvious sense that one’s first love held meaning, or that Gatsby longing after a green light meant more than nothing.
So: what do these things mean?
I do not know. Interpretation is not the task of identifying meaning. It is cultivating faith that meaning exists.
Interpretation is not nailing down a fixed meaning, the way a twelfth grader might in a thesis statement. Fixed, eternal meanings do not exist. Trying to identify an inherent and stable meaning in an experience is like trying to staple sunlight onto the pavement. Instead, interpretation is wide-eyed. It sees things as they are and wonders what they mean. It lets the light slide across the objects in the world before fading away.
This world of forms demands inspection from the senses and the mind. You can’t help but look. In return, the mind demands meaning. Interpretation is the space between the two. It is the mind inhabiting the gap between a sensing human and senseless events.
This space is pulsing with unstable meaning. Yet it is unable to be described in words, much less in a five-paragraph essay. And yet this is the space in which we live.