And, more specifically, of a God who smiles on order, but not on the tyranny of the exacting, or the overcritical.
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For no two instances in any given category are identical, but instead have their individual histories, natures, and personalities, not to mention their quirks and aberrations. And thus the absoluteness of category as an expression of ‘boundedness’ is mitigated, or relaxed, by the relativity of variation. Which comforts me because it speaks to me of God.
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I suppose there is something comforting to me, in repetition, as a pattern to be found in reality, as it suggests both the singularity of categories, and the multiplicity of the variations that can appear within categories.
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The significance of which is not, I don’t think, in the things or persons themselves, or in what they represent, symbolically (though I would guess that is important too, in some way), but in the repetition. Though what that significance is I’d find difficult to say.
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I have a thing, I think (call it a preoccupation or an obsession or a fetish, I don’t know what the best word would be), for the replication or cloning of certain images or characters in my fiction and my visual art. As is evidenced here, in the novel I was describing, in the numbering off or inclusion of the characters who are ‘painters.’
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There is also, I should add, a fourth painter in that novel, in the person responsible for the real or apocryphal painting that the third woman speaks about, so that this figure, even if never mentioned again (or mentioned again but never seen) might also work their way into the reader’s mind, as among the painters alluded to by one of those possible titles.
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Or maybe I would title it Two Painters, so that the reader would be left to consider (assuming the novel delivered on its complications) which two of the three characters the title refers to, thus involving that reader in a mental or psychological quandary that would not, I hope, easily resolve itself, insofar as one of the purposes of any artwork is to produce a set of circumstances in which the audience, in the privacy of their own self, or interiority, find themselves wanting to dwell, without necessarily arriving at a conclusion with regard to the scenarios they’ve encountered.
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Three Painters I might have called this novel, for example, even though only two of the women in the novel are actual painters (or still presently paint, in the time of the novel), while the third woman (the one with the dog, who lives in the building near the studio of the second woman) no longer paints, though she is the one who mentions the painting to which she has ascribed a mysterious quality, and that she claims to know the location of.
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Though I do think that titling a novel while it is still a work-in-progress, if doing so doesn’t distract a writer, can help that writer conceive of the symbolic value of the work that is already underway and that will precipitate itself into the future not only by way of the writer’s technical ability but also through the more fanciful and intuitive aspects of their talent, even if the writer understands that the title they have chosen might be something of a placeholder, and thus be subject to change.
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Or maybe I wouldn’t give much thought to a title at first, but would simply write the novel from beginning to end, at which point, once the manuscript was complete, and I could consider it in its entirety, and grasp its meaning, insofar as it had any meaning that one might grasp, I’d furnish it with whatever title seemed fitting and consequential at that time.
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I imagine, at that stage, I might start thinking about what the novel’s title could be, before I got very far into the writing of the novel itself, and that I would keep a list of titles some place, maybe in the document where I was writing the novel, or in some other, separate document, or that I’d merely change the title, in my head, from one to another, until I settled on one that I liked enough not to change it again, though I might wonder from time to time, as I continued to write, whether an earlier title had been better, or more suited to the manuscript, and to the themes and meanings I was finding therein.
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For instance, the narrative might observe the reaction of the woman who the novel had opened with, and not the reaction of the woman who is her friend (the woman whose studio they are in), though more likely it would observe both women’s reactions, to some degree, before zeroing in on, and following, the reaction of that first woman (the woman who the novel began with), so that the confluence of her psychic ‘block’ (regarding the painting she had started but is unable to complete) and this neighbor woman’s tale (about the location of a painting that has an uncanny or supernatural quality, and that may or may not have any basis in reality) might be dramatized.
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At that point I could decide whether the painting that the woman is describing has any existence in the reality of the story, beyond her mentioning of it, or whether she has invented it, the way one might invent any kind of fiction, for a purpose that the novel would then be tasked with understanding, or discerning, insofar as the reader’s curiosity as to the woman’s motive will need to be satisfied before the reader can grasp the extent of her story’s consequences, and measure its significance with regard to how it is received by the two other women, who will respond to it however they wish to, or in whatever way is natural to them, with skepticism or belief (in equal or varying degrees), even if the novel chooses to explore the reaction of one of these women more than that of the other, or that of one of them to the exclusion of that of the other.
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Let us say, in the story I was telling, about the painter who can’t figure out how to proceed with a painting she has started, and who is now in the studio of her friend who is also a painter (along with the other woman who they happened to have encountered on the sidewalk, when they were returning from the store where they’d bought the bottle of liquor), that something unexpected happens, while the three of them are sitting there drinking from paper cups (that the friend whose studio it is keeps in a cabinet above the sink where she rinses her brushes); and that this unexpected thing takes the form of a piece of information that the woman who’d joined them (the woman from the sidewalk, who, unlike them, is not a painter, though she once was one, and now considers herself not a painter only because she no longer paints, and instead does more or less nothing, and survives on a pension that the government provides to most people her age, as well as on the meager savings she retired with, after a career that ended long ago) reveals in the course of the conversation; and that this piece of information involves the location of a painting that, according to the woman (who has declined the alcohol that the other two are sharing, and instead is drinking water from her paper cup), seems to depict, to whoever happens to be viewing it, some episode from the life of that person that the person had never shared with anyone else, and had thought no one else knew about.
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For there is, at the core of every realized artwork, a secret that does not permit itself to be known, even to the artist, until it is revealed by the industriousness and virtuosity that the artist brings to their medium. And even then this secret isn’t known as much as it is felt. For it belongs neither to the artwork’s content, nor its form, but is what arises from the union of the two.
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So that there is, at once, an inevitability to what these characters will say and do, and a complete absence of inevitability, insofar as the characters will not do that which they are fated to do until I ordain that they will do it. And yet they are, somehow, always going to do that particular thing, and not something else, so long as the novel finds itself on sure footing, by which I mean is written with an artistry that does not force language to do the bidding of the imagination, but to lead the imagination, almost as if it were a trusted and beloved guide that knew the imagination better than the imagination knew itself, so that the two of them will move forward hand in hand, with the former advancing slightly before the latter, though not without heeding the latter’s moods and predilections, and allowing them to affect its articulations.
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If I were to wonder, for example, what might happen next in the story I’d begun about the painter who was having trouble finishing a particular painting, and who’d stopped in at the studio of a friend who was also a painter, to distract herself and to clear her mind, so that now she was passing some time with that friend, as well as with a woman who was a neighbor of the friend (and who the two of them had encountered on the sidewalk outside, walking her dog, when they themselves were returning from the store to which they’d gone to buy the alcohol that they would stir into the drinks they would make), I might allow a conversation between the three women to unfold, though what that conversation might be about I would not initially know, though in time I would come to know it, and perhaps even encourage it to follow one trajectory as opposed to another, insofar as I, in my capacity as author, would want to discover, at the same time as my characters would, or in the imminence that would precede their discovery of it (if indeed they would discover it at all), that which motivates them to utter what they will utter, and to do what they will do.
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In other words, the modes by which the contents of mind are administered, through the creative process, are, I would say, like two liquids that will slip back and forth in a bottle, through the glass of which, if one were to hold it before one’s eyes and tilt it, one would observe a degree of admixture that rarely, if ever, repeats its configurations, and that cannot be sussed out or disentangled.
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So that one would not be able to pinpoint, I don’ think, while watching an artist at work, moments when one or the other of these modes is more consequent than the other. For even if an observer is able to notice changes in an artist’s demeanor that seem to suggest an inward shift, that observer will have no way of knowing the precise imbalance of, or differential between, the conscious and subconscious elements of that artist’s mind.
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For it is more likely in the synthesis of the conscious and the subconscious, and not in a separation of the workings of the two (instances of which would be impossible to isolate, as they function like pedals on an organ that are constantly depressed and released, to produce, together, varying combinations of influence) that an artwork finds its expression.