Imagine your way through this screen.

Hi there!

I've been busy cutting creeping trumpet vine off the peach tree, rendering a client's video on my laptop (occupying my computer's resources 100%), communicating with a family of raccoons, taking notes on house finches' fruit-eating preferences, and such, so it's been hard to write. Sorry about that, invisible audience.

My friend Lydia, whose link is to the right (your right, my left - I'm IN your computer), recommended me a movie that is really up my alley. I am including it as a link, not embedded, because it is really beautiful and worth some time waiting to watch the individual crystals fall.

Grizzly Bear Movie by Allison Schulnik

In my distracted wait time re this endless render I've been doing some drawing, and intend to find time soon to post. It's always a struggle though of course. But I was thinking about detail and why to draw instead of just doing something else or nothing and I wasn't really thinking that at all. Then I read an article about cryogenics and there was a line that stuck in me;

"Peggy asked Robin to read “The Brothers Karamazov,” and he asked her to read “The Lord of the Rings.” She hated it. “I asked him why he loved it, and he said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. This guy has invented this whole world.’ He asked me why I hated it, and I said: ‘Because it’s so full of detail. There was nowhere for the reader to imagine her own interpretation.’"

Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about interpretation and the freedom of the viewer, and there's been a lot of concern about things being too full up. I didn't like "Lord of the Rings" that much either when I read it. I'm not a very passive viewer of art or of movies. I think respecting an author's ability to build a whole world is also to defer to his authority, to acknowledge that the world that you are experiencing belongs to someone else. Maybe in my most lethargically doe eyed moments I can become a true couch potato, 100% separate from the world, a witnessing non-being, but I think that this state of consciousness, though a great luxury, is corrosive and disempowering.

But simply underdefining is not enough. An unfinished sentence itself is inert; it is the act of filling in the blanks that becomes the content, the appreciation, the active sensing, the external world as always residing in the imagination.

Does this make sense? (All of my opinions are test pieces.)