Diminution

"The whole essence of art is that it contracts and reduces itself to scale. Those who talk of the artist nature swelling and expanding, those who talk of the outbreak, licence and overflowing of art are people with no sort of feeling of what art is. Art means diminution. If what you want is largeness, the universe as it is is large enough for anybody. Art exists solely in order to create a miniature universe, a working model of the universe, a toy universe which we can play with as a child plays with a toy theatre."

― G.K. Chesterton

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Dear Kate,

One of the many joys of writing is that you are ahead of yourself.

You always are, how can you not be?

You mean you would map out an airtight argument, a consistent worldview, a contained universe, and approach every piece with a three-point thesis, the kind of writing that kills writing?  I suppose there must be a place for it, and for the very young with an one-track mind, in need of the strict discipline to summarize and conclude and....pontificate.

Just now before I sat down I didn't really know what I was going to write if at all.  And just now after I've written my last I decided commas are perfunctory and none should stand in the way of the particular thought.  As it occurred I delayed revealing the true object of my last sentence until the very end just for fun.  Who would have thought of all these?  I didn't.  Until they happened.  I don't know what's going to happen next until I press Enter twice to get down there.

Going down, going deeper, even for the most disciplined, hardworking ants, who go about their business without any sense of defiance, moving forward in one direction, together with a single-minded army vision.  People say ants can only see two-dimensions, and I am not a scientist to unravel what this claim actually means.  If it means their vision on a flat sheet of paper is not unlike ours standing on the vast, seemingly boundless surface of the globe, perceiving it as a two-dimensional world, then I can see the claim's implication, to ants as no less to human.  Yet even ants dig downward and termites build upward, avail a third dimension to their existence, however little and banal.

How many "dimensions" you think we can perceive?  What does it take for us to stop lying to ourselves that what-we-see-is-what-we-get and life must stay "on track" without being informed by what transcends our three-point thesis?  Are we no more than ants and termites to dig deeper and reach further to "explore the innards" of our existence?

I've walked away before this last paragraph to wash my son's McDonald's work shoes.  Fatty brain unused turns into grease, and the smell of grease, do you know, you can never really get rid of it?

Yours, Alex