Realizing that I don’t have a monopoly on interpreting works of art, I still feel a little cheated every time I see someone start a blog, or a book, or whatever with references to authors, books, songs, artists, or whatever that I really like, and I think, Hey, Here’s Someone Like Me, Here’s Someone Who Gets It — whatever It is — and then discover that in fact the website or book or the whatever has nothing to do with my expectations, nothing to do with my concerns or interests, nothing in common with what attracted me to that song or book or author in the first place. It’s like you’re bait-and-switched, thinking that here was something just perfect, as if it was created if not for you (that would be a horribly egocentric thought), then at the very least by someone of like mind, and then you have every expectation subverted. You expect to share something more with someone who appreciates the same thing as you, and then it turns out that you’re really very different from this person, and that this thing you both like (for different reasons) may be the only thing you two have in common. And you feel cheated, which isn’t really fair, since after all, you don’t have a monopoly on the true meaning of a thing, and who’s to say their interpretation of the thing you like is any worse than yours?
I feel something of the same every time I look at the blogs of people who read my blog. Often, I can’t for the life of me understand what they could possibly share with me. They seem totally different, as if their concerns and personalities are just in a completely different place from mine. That doesn’t need to be negative: sometimes different is bad, sometimes different is just different. I’ve always thought, and might have said in the past, that I write this for a reader sufficiently like me to care about the things I write about. I write with an audience in mind, but that audience is in part defined by their interest in what I write, a train of thought that, when it works, keeps me from indulging in things only I care about while allowing me to get things off my chest that only people pretty similar to me care about, so that concern for the opinion of the masses doesn’t crush my legitimate, if unpopular interests and concerns. (Sometimes it doesn’t work.) And if that is so, it’s amazing that all these totally different people — different from me and from each other — find meaning and value in what I do anyway.
I guess that’s a reflection of a rather subtle point about meaning: meaning is not in the thing itself (the blog post, the image, the book, the song, the building, etc.), nor exclusively in the individual perceiving it, but in the whole system of the object, the person perceiving it, and the context — and apparently very different sets of people and contexts can result in the same feeling towards the object. It’s interesting that different people from different backgrounds can find meaning and value in the same thing, for completely different reasons. It’s surprising and a little annoying when it happens with, say, a book, so that when I go to the blog whose title references a subtle and obscure point of a favorite book, I may discover that I don’t care for the contents; but it’s absolutely astonishing when this happens with something you create yourself. You think that what you do is truly personal, and it is, in a sense, but even so, someone whose whole person is completely different from you can still find a point of view far from yours from which what you did is just as valuable to them as it was to you from your POV.
That’s really incredible. But maybe it’s incredible because I, and I like to think most people with me, am just so convinced that I’m both a) different from everyone else, and b) in possession of the one true version of whatever I do. And in reality, both a) and b) are false and it’s really quite wonderful.
Does the above make sense? If not, that is what you get for posting at 2:30 am when melancholia is your dominant emotion.
