CAPTURING LIFE ON THE PAGE

IS CAPTURING THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN WORDS ON THE PAGE A FUTILE PURSUIT?

In his paper on operator's manuals, James Paradis makes a claim that by the very nature of their medium, manuals and instructions cannot possibly account for the entire range of experiences that can happen in the real world. It's a severe limit of the medium, indeed. There are so many variables in our busy and random world, especially so in places like construction sites, where the nailguns being referenced in Paradis's essay were being used. In attempting and failing to account for the possible dangers of the tools, the manual writers for the respective studgun companies allowed human life to fall through the cracks. It's certainly appropriate that these mistakes were legislated! That the manuals were written by tradesmen first and barely scrutinized before publishing is unsettling, and makes one wonder how many other companies cut similar corners in making safety warnings for their products.
    However, I'm not so confident that Paradis' perspective on capturing the world into text is entirely correct. The way he writes that user manuals can't possibly account for all of the variables in a real work environment makes Paradis sound downright sympathetic to the people responsible for putting out dangerous tools without appropriate warnings. Is it truly impossible, as Paradis says, to take even a narrow snapshot of the greater world and put it on the page? Surely, it can't be. If that option was so entirely off the table, then people wouldn't be spending as much time as they do on writing as a medium. It's the job of any artist, no matter the medium, to try to capture life's ephemera as best they can. It's not an easy task, indeed, but it's far from impossible. This is why people get degrees in the arts. Perhaps it's not that we should consider this kind of thoroughness in writing impossible; we must instead understand that even the most seemingly innocuous forms of communication should be done by those who really know what they're doing.
    
    I could talk for hours about my journey as a fiction writer in attempting to do just what Paradis says is impossible: catching lightning in a bottle in the form of the living, breathing world and putting it to paper. But, for the sake of keeping out of my own head, let's take a look at other mediums. In particular, the visual. I'll attach to this post a couple of pieces that have delivered something so much more than the shapes and colors on the screen.

Savanna Judd. QuikTrip In Green.

This scene invokes a lot more senses than the visual. In its surreality, it becomes somehow even more real. The jungle-like foliage and mystery of the circumstances capture how lost one feels in walking into a quick-stop gas station shop–the familiarity, because they're all so similar, combined with the looming mystery that comes from them all being just different enough that you won't be able to find the bathroom right away, no matter how hard you try. The space is cramped, and one wonders how it's even possible to move around among the shelves. When I look at this piece, I feel the sensations attached to the place without being in it at all.

 Andrey Surnov. Evening Traffic 1.

 

This image gives me chills. The lighting is breathtaking, in particular the way the clouds are backlit. Once again, the further from reality that this painting gets, the more it gets close to how the context it captures actually feels. The horizon is hard to make out, the highlights of the road underfoot brighter than anything else. One feels small, but they also feel the sort of excitement one feels at the beginning or end of a long trip. Are we coming home? Going somewhere else? Either way, in this moment, this vertical slice, we're floating with everyone else on this road.

All in all, it seems dismissive to say that any medium is incapable of capturing the reality of the human condition. So many people put their blood, sweat, and tears into getting the feelings that they have onto paper so that they can share them with others. In some ways, experiencing someone's art is the closest one can ever get to truly understanding what the world looks like through another's eyes. It's not easy to capture life's ephemera or complexities, no, but it's very much doable in many kinds of mediums. It just takes a skillful hand.
What are some works that you've experienced that have made you feel something more deep than the sensory details it provided? Do you think that certain mediums work better for such experiences? Movies? Games? Paintings? Books? Why? What's a feeling or a moment that you think is truly impossible to capture in art?
Do you think it's possible to capture the human experience in a satisfying way? More importantly, do you think you could do it?