The Blue LineSpace is that blue linereaching up the gray stem of your brain stretching out in spirals across temporal lobes and cortices looping through vast neuronal distance towards the polar circuit that will connect you to everything. Landscape and StoryA rich landscape, like a superior story, promises us a diverting journey. Not only will we travel from point A to point B; we will also enjoy a variety of short excursions. It is this unpredictable exploration of byways, this discursive quality, which gives power and depth to both landscape and story. A landscape which transports our eye instantly from A to B is as disappointing as a story that prefigures its ending in the opening line. A landscape must be composed in a way that its contours only gradually reveal its inner space. Just as the draftsman, through a major axis, gives the viewer a pull towards the horizon of the landscape, so does the storyteller, through a narrator, provide the reader with a line that reaches towards the end of the action. However, before the landscape reveals its furthest space or the story moves through its denouement, both artists must offer us those multiple diversions of place and perspective that echo the uncertainty and discontinuity of actual travel. The best landscapes and stories are episodic. There is, of course, a principal avenue that we travel, but we are also taken on frequent detours down branching alleys, digressions which give our journey the texture of artistic experience. |  |
