You're forgetting

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Friday, June 07, 2013, 20:26 (3983 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I've thought about this, and I think ultimately that a misinterpretation of a work of art is either the failure of the person viewing who himself lacks the life experience (or intelligence) to correctly interpret it, or it is a failure of the artist who either lacks the life experience himself (and is drawing from the 'matrix' instead of his own experience), or lacks the life experience to know how other people experience things.

I don't even think there IS such a thing as a misinterpretation and 'successes' and 'failures' in this regard - and that's what makes art and the world amazing. Once you set your stories free they can become entirely different things to different people - they become a crystal with an infinite amount of facets that can be peered into and compared, which then only builds more facets...

And where the 'matrix' ends and a 'real' experience begins is a vague line for me; sometimes I don't think there's a difference at all. From all the dreams I've had and stories I've experienced, I sometimes feel like I've lived hundreds of lives -lives that rise and fall in my subconscious like half-remembered dreams. And they inspire me and invite new dreams I want to illustrate. They come from a different place than my waking reality, but not necessarily less of a place.

That girl that I dreamed of 5 years ago... The one I fell in love with and then broke her heart... The hard emotions that stayed with me as I awoke... Should I have disregarded all that because I never 'truly' experienced it? Were those emotions somehow worth less than others? And if I poured that experience into a story... would that story be a waste of time? Could I or anyone else not learn from that or resonate with it? The girl was a dream, the emotions were real, and a false story created a truth. So was it 'false' to begin with?

Just because it's a story, a metaphor, a dream, a matrix, that doesn't make it less real to me - it's just a different beast is all. And I can learn from all of types and kinds. Whether I'm in-line with the author's intent or not, I can still take something meaningful and wonderful from their work. Sometimes an author's accidents can turn into fireworks for a reader, and I think that's worth celebrating.

I've found that last paragraph is best read in a Bob Ross voice, btw.