Getting the Message

photo by Joe Gioia

I’m pretty sure that the reason I write is to be understood, to communicate, which would have to eventually come down to sending a message. Why, else? As a kid, I wrote to show off my handwriting, but even that may come down to the same thing. When I think back to my days of handwriting formulation—the block letters of sixth grade, the typewriter-emulating a’s and g’s of seventh—I saw penmanship as a means to an end, a way of becoming worth reading. Another possible answer, less glib: I write to use words, to exercise a skill the way a guitar player might itch to play or a runner to get her cleats on and dig. I probably don’t even need to make this argument, but just in case: music enchants, exercise enlivens, words mean.

It’s all clear as rain until I consider a book like Ulysses, which is so encoded and layered that it would require a paid guide for me to fathom it. Then I think, how can the making of that thing and the work I do even be described using the same verb?

* * *

I grew up with a father who was a designer in the Bauhaus mold, for whom the words Less is More were more of a credo than anything involving honor, country, or God. E.B. White’s dictum, to omit needless words, was one of the only things he ever made a point of teaching me, showing me how a page-long fifth grade essay could be collapsed into a single, pithy paragraph. Now, when I teach, one of my favorite exercises is to have students take a piece of work they believe to be finished and cut it down by 20 percent. Not possible! they whine, and then cut a few words just to humor me, and then a few more, and finally whole paragraphs and… no one has ever thanked me, but the point is: it is always do-able. Is it always worth doing?

* * *

I am writing this in the home stretch of a four-week retreat among other writers, artists, and musicians. Last night, David Opdyke showed us slides of an installation he recently did at an elementary school in New York City. The piece, Figure it Out, is made up of rows of paper airplanes hung at intervals on long strings through an open two-story space. The shadows cast by the individual planes, when viewed at a distance, actually spell out words which, once perceived, can also then be seen in the rows of planes—each plane a pixel, as it were. He has printed the paper with material that relates to his own child-mind (not the dense, highly technical content he has used in another, similar work), although the printed-on surfaces are largely invisible to the viewer. When I asked him if he had tested whether children from the school could discern the words the shadows spelled out, he said no, he didn’t want it to be that obvious.

This work of David’s is very beautiful, no matter what you read or don’t read in it, and there are many surfaces and angles and details that keep it interesting to the eye. It’s also “fun,” because the paper airplanes are recognizable artifacts of childhood, and because he has made them do something we haven’t seen them do before. I think, moreover, it would stand up to my father’s scrutiny—there are no wasted gestures, no extraneous parts. But there is also more to it, just the way there is more to Ulysses than the story each paragraph tells (or so I’m told), and the kids at PS 163K are probably never going to know that, or maybe just one or two of them will actually “figure it out” and understand the whole work at any level of complexity approaching what David has designed into it. The other visual artists at his presentation nodded in unison when he said what he said about not making it too legible—this seemed to be a basic tenet of art-making for them. It is important that there be layers, and mysteries. If they were making work that simply said what it meant, it would be commercial artwork, graphic design.

And if they really wanted to produce meaning as a primary goal, they would be writers. But if I hold with my father’s commandment to omit needless words can I, too, have layers and mysteries? Like the visual artists, I want to have work that is available to the public, to be seen and appreciated by people who do not have the codebook of my particular history, language, concerns, etc. Like them, I create from a place inside that I can barely describe—nor would I want to (Artists’ statements: shudder). I write to be understood. In fact I need to be understood—that’s the only way I can tell if I have succeeded in creating a world of complexity and uncertainty, shadows and tangles, that is anything like the truth.

Rachel Cline is the author of two novels, What to Keep (lots of opinions on Amazon), and My Liar (about women, work, and the movie business). A third novel, tentatively titled The Tis Bottle, is about the legacy of charismatic and pedophilic teacher.

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