dissertation_05

"Nor does poetry refuse to carry on a sort of process of reasoning by deducing one truth from another. Her demonstrations differ, however, from ordinary ones by requiring that each step should be in itself beautiful, or striking, and that they all should carry the mind to the final conclusion without the consciousness of labor." -William Cullen Bryant

When trying to compose "dissertations" as a lark - or rather, as a kind of exercise in combining shapes and lines and corruptions and textures all together in ways that make a final aesthetic conclusion (read: composition); we can ask does it make sense? Some artists will insist that there is no sense in a design - or even revolt against the idea that making sense is a good or useful constraint for art to have on itself.

Some of us enjoy it, though. Some of us enjoy taking lines and circles and balancing the thick blocky structures with gossamer structures that suggest connection more than build it. Bad poetry can rhyme too, though. Awful poetry often rhymes. Building the thing as it needs to be simply by the rules often produces the worst examples. And yet - in some of my favorite art each little brick and color and branch folds up in such a way that that particular step is beautiful, or striking - and without being so gauche as to suggest actual gravity or actual rules the next shape and position is dictated by it.

Who could possibly be so arrogant as to look at a bad composition and call it "wrong," though? Yet - there is a way that a poem or a composition works and a way that it does not. The work of artistry is communicating something that is correct without the labor of reasoning about it but simply intuiting and then impressing an eloquent visual thing - to carry someone else along with us to the conclusion.