I watched the movie Synecdoche, New York last night. I say this, not to position what follows as a review, but to give context. I often worry that the connections my brain makes might come off as garbled nonsense to an outsider, but Charlie Kaufman doesn’t seem to worry much about that and is apparently doing okay, so perhaps I should relax.
When we make art, the audience interacts with it at three levels of perception. First and foremost, they perceive the art; second, they perceive the ideas the art is meant to express; third, they perceive the person behind the art, the artist. It is a matryoshka doll, a thing in a thing in a thing which is all somehow, simultaneously, the same thing. The definition of a synecdoche is when a part stands in for the whole or the whole stands in for a part: here, the art stands for the idea stands for the artist stands for the idea stands for the art.
Self-expression is also self-impression, both in the sense of impact and of emulation. We affect and are affected, as I wrote before – and, because we are our characters, we share their fates, suffer with them, die with them, are reborn as them. It is the agony of being just one person with just one life that drives us to create, so we can live again, die again, live again, die.
It’s impossible to really know someone solely through the work they create – it is also impossible not to. It is impossible to know anyone at all; it is impossible to be known. Yet we try! We open the windows we can find, try to let the light in or let the dark out, but the impressions we leave are partial, fragments of a whole, synecdochal silhouettes. They fail to express the entirety of the idea; the idea fails to express the entirety of the self; the self fails to encompass the entirety of its art. An ouroboros of imperfection, of partial success, representing some greater whole that we strive for, something unnameable, possibly divine.
This approach, though, only conceives of art as a solitary pursuit. I tend to default to this mindset because I seldom collaborate – or perhaps I seldom collaborate because this is my mindset. With collaboration, many selves have many ideas and pool their labor and talents to create a single work bridging them. So: What is the whole that you see partially represented in that work? Not one, but many ideas – not one, but many selves. Isn’t this magic? The idea you see is fractal, manifold. The reality represented is glanced at from countless different angles, interpretations. Does it seem less real for it?
Here’s the trick: Our brains are broken. Not in the sense a machine is broken, but in the sense a mirror is broken. We already hold multiple conflicting views on each topic we hold views on. Each idea is a tangle, our living reality is fractal, gaining and losing detail as we gain and lose focus on individual facets. One artist? Many artists? Either way, it’s going to be a jumbled cluster of thoughts, and either way we’re going to relate to the expression of those thoughts as though it were another human being.
We see so little and extrapolate so much. We are so small and distant and yet so intimately connected, stars in constellations in galaxies, each with our part to play, with each part representing the whole.