Question about how we look at text
I’m beginning with the assumption that before print, when few in Western Europe were literate, and most texts copied laboriously, there was a sense that texts were authoritative, or truth
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Newton made a similar allegory in his theory on the refraction of light. His idea was that atoms of light moved through space, and in the same way that balls rolling on a table into a dip in the surface of the table are diverted from their straight course, so atoms of light are diverted by the curvature in space created by a jar of water, for example. Again, wrong in the light of our understanding of quantum physics, but not such a bad allegory.
Newton's allegory had at the core of it a concept of space-curvature, something that we can only describe through allegory, not experience directly. But by being able to communicate the allegory, the concept of curvature in one higher dimension than the one under observation remains a valid concept, and when re-applied to Einstein's field theory, finds new fecundity in the general theory of Relativity.
So, clearly the world of scientific thought is improved by these eternal, form-like concepts that need artistic expression to work their magic on the brain.
It leads me to believe that a similar form exists, platonically outside the text, on which the text is like the string and sounding-board to the note played. Somewhere in the bowels of our mind there may be a template story that the text conveys. If so, then both the text and the derivative, interactive, gestalt, synthetic, whatever you want to call the new media version both stand alone, but as different works, both an expression of the formal part. Which is to say there are only derivative works, just some are built on others, and to appreciate a work in context or out of context are different, not-necessarily-opposed experiences.
But there is a part in me that balks, the tyrannical child that KNOWS what the story is supposed to be like. That demands that daddy use the voice, you know, the squeaky one, when he tells it. I think the question is whether we appease the tyrant in us or in our culture-learned-in-the-schoolroom, or whether we let go of the dearness of the work as we first experienced it and let it go out, experience the world and become something else.
....Can you tell I'm avoiding work?
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I have to read this again, because my brain she is rattling around inside my skull like electrified peas after reading this comment.
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:D
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