it's finals week.

To be more specific, not only has this week been positively littered with final-exam detritus, but next Wednesday and Friday and the Monday after that will suffer in a similar manner. Tomorrow's no better, with the ten-page Lit Theory project due and me only about four pages into it as of tonight.

Composing theory always makes me feel just a little bit more entangled inside - that is, caught up in the conventions of the method great thinkers use to present their ideas nowadays. I resent the fact that the academic world has a difficult time accepting alternative dissemination techniques (read: forms dismissed or pondered over as "art") as legitimate.

Suppose, for example, you take a look at this picture:
 

thanks, Nick

and appreciated its content. You saw the oblong shapes of light, the tilt of the background lines, the ambiguous long-haired human-esque figure postioned in the bottom corner - and you appreciated them for exactly what they were, taking it all in "at face value," so to speak.

That particular picture isn't of anything. If I were to tell you that it represents a student or teacher, standing under fluorescent lights, reading from an open book in a classroom that used to be a bank vault, I would be lying. In a technical sense, I may be giving the circumstantial facts under which the image was made, but I am misrepresenting the picture.

Why, and how, could I possibly be doing that? I was in the room when that picture was taken; all the facts described surrounding the circumstance of the picture are completely accurate. So how could my statement that the picture represented those facts be false?

Not as complicated as it seems. That picture is not intended to, and does not, represent the facts of a circumstance. It represents what the artist saw, imagined, or experienced and wanted to portray. That image is a picture of the artist's feeling associated with a student or teacher, standing under fluorescent lights, reading from an open book in a classroom that used to be a bank vault.

So I would be lying if I told you that it were a picture of those facts. It may represent a situation, but for me to attempt to clearly define the situation (me not being the artist) - it'd be tricky to describe exactly what the situation was.

And for the artist to be able to bring a representation of that situation into tangibility through a photograph - that's honorable. That picture may be the only way to ever accurately portray what the artist wanted to portray. In fact, it may be that feeling's only "portal into reality;" that is, that image as it is could be the only real translation that feeling ever recieves.

So to reduce it to the facts of a circumstance is blatant misrepresentation; a lie.

Now to milk that for some opinions and some page space.
I'll put the rest of my head here later, including what I want this blog to be and some unbelievably good-tasting mesquite cookies. And me taking down the fennel, and planning to infuse the creosote. Space and time work against me right now.
'till then, all the best <3