My Artistic Philosophy
This is more for me than anyone else. That’s because I’m not certain on this, I’m just realising it as an idea and want a home for it whilst I mull my style over to death.
By style, I more so mean philosophy—my philosophy of art. Recently—with my Lynchian attachment still in full swing—I have wanted to delve into Absurdism. This was David Lynch’s style, one that poses the universe—or at least our experience of it—as completely chaotic and relying on our intuition to help pave the way before us.
A drunk discussion last night has had me thinking: although we cannot always perceive them, there are through-lines for everything in our lives. For example, even the discussion of through-lines over a G&T at our fourth pub of the night with my friend was rooted in a conversation from the morning I’d had with another friend over coffee. He’d mentioned an idea for a story he’s planning to devise, in which the protagonist comes into contact with something that makes him realise the temporal, limited and fragile nature of life. What I posed back to him is that although something can make the protagonist realise this, his coming to terms with that idea isn’t a singularity that occurs spontaneously in the moment. The realisation has to be rooted in the character’s experience—i.e. what behaviour, ethics (etc.) his friends have demonstrated around him. It is not necessary for the protagonist to realise or know this—to him it can just be the arrival of this revelatory contact that has caused him to change. As hard analysts looking through a glass roof, above, though, we should be able to map out how he came to this realisation if we are intellectually inclined to do so. Not everyone will be able to do this, but everyone can with the right understanding.
This is internal logic which all stories have. This doesn’t have to be in a language we always understand, but it will be present, especially if depicting a fictional version of our world.
The same is true of reality. Even if we can’t see it, a higher being looking through the glass roof of our universe may be able to point out the logical conclusion of how the beginning of the universe results in everything that happens and its end. Each individual life and event, had the higher being the means to do so, could be mapped by studying all the factors at play. They may follow the interaction of environment and molecular brain composition to rationally understand why all things in the individual’s life happened as they did.
In stories we create, we are the higher being. We have the ability to look down into a story, a world devised by ourselves and say, “Look, this happened here, which led to this, and then this, so of course we arrive at this end.”
Through-lines do not stop until they reach the edge/beginning/end of a contained universe, be it our own or a fictionalised one. We don’t need to map them that far, but if it was desired, we could navigate logic to lead us there.
Through-lines relate to what I call the Never-ending “Why?”. It is a philosophical problem regarding taking absolutely any statement and continuously asking “why?” in response. Regardless of the statement, if the conversation is followed logically by those involved, you arrive at the beginning/end/nature of our universe, at which point we cannot answer confidently with any answer that denotes truth. We as humans in our contemporary state cannot in any circumstance confidently assert to know about the foundation of, the cause of, or nature beyond our universe. It is illogical, and to use a drunken word from last night, it is indecent for us to pose that we do know anything.
This relates to stories and internal logic in the way that if we provide our character free will and the same capabilities we have—as more thought experiment than literal—they could trace the steps that led them to their current position, going beyond themselves and following the nature of their world toward its cause. They will never be able to know that they have been designed by someone. It would be indecent of them to claim anything with the label of “absolute knowledge” of how they came to be, because for all they know, they just appeared. Their arrival as characters in a story may have just appeared into existence. You might call this, the impossible arrival of all that is known.
Well, this really has become a philosophical discussion beyond just my style, though they are intertwined. What is my style, then? What is my artistic philosophy.
Agreeing with Lynch and Absurdism, I believe that our experience of the world is often chaotic. How we must respond to the arrival of an event or thing in our life is chaotic, not affording us time to map the through-lines, but demanding that we take action immediately. However, an observer from above, watching us through a television screen or through the pages of a book, can see those through-lines. Logic is never vanquished from story and art.
I cannot think whether this philosophy has a name, though it is undoubtedly influenced by Stoic and Logos-centric philosophy. However, this is probably my style as it stands:
Our experience of life is chaotic, but never illogical.
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NOTE: EDIT/REVISION
In the process of getting carried away writing this, I forgot one of the key elements of my belief/ process that I will have to integrate into this at a later date. It is that there is some element of “throw everything at a wall and see what sticks” in my work. Through-lines come into this, because I have faith that through-lines are always possible to find. I have faith in my creative process that what occurs and what gets implemented, seemingly out of nowhere, or in the immediacy of freewriting, is involved in through-lines that I am unconsciously building across. This may explain why some writers feel that their characters “don’t do what they (the writer) want or intended.”