Interpretation

            David finally came by early Sunday afternoon on October 2^nd to give me back the twenty dollars that I’d leant him, plus and extra ten as a gift of gratitude. That was nice. I can buy toilet paper on Monday.

            Jonquil is hanging on. She moved behind the garbage can for several hours but then managed the trek to the middle of the living room floor, where she peed. After she gathered her strength she went behind the couch where I could really smell her dying body and where her cries sounded like an auto-tuned rusty door-hinge.

            I wrote my weekly paragraph for Aesthetics and submitted it, but when I began the initial stream of consciousness writing from which I derived my submission, I had to get as far away as I could from Jonquil’s whining. I put my boots on and took a chair out onto the back deck, and then I climbed over the railing and took the chair to a sunny spot on the roof to write. It was just what I needed to relax and get something done. Here’s my paragraph:

Robert Stecker’s “Interpretation” shows that the interpretation of the meanings and intentions behind works of art are not always obvious or even existent. He suggests that even the artist that created a given work may not know the meaning of the piece they were inspired to bring into the world. He argues further that even in cases where an artist had a clear intention as to his or her artwork’s meaning, the relevant meaning for a particular audience may be a different one. For example, an Anarchist audience may view a particular artwork as presenting clear metaphors that illustrate that group’s cause of the abolition of government and the promotion of a socially cooperative society, even though that may not have been the intention of the artist who created the piece. Another example is that some viewers may tend to interpret works of art in Freudian terms that may derive meaning from the artwork that is deeper than that intended by the author, based on the theory that all artworks are in a sense, waking dreams, and so need to be interpreted according to Freudian dream symbolism. Many artworks are not created with an intended meaning because they are meant to be ambiguous and it is left to the members of the audience to find a meaning for themselves. It can be argued that the greatest enjoyments that can be derived from the appreciation of artworks are the personal interpretations of each viewer, reader or listener.

I’ve been throwing down ideas for my Canadian Poetry essay. There’s a list of twenty potential topics, but only three of them have Leonard Cohen in them, who is the poet that I know best, so my choices are:
            Treat Beat Movement aesthetics in Cohen, Bowering and Layton.

Examine Decadence Movement aesthetics in Cohen, Ondaatje and Musgrave.

Identify mysticism in Cohen, MacEwan and Szumigalski.

Although I’ve been told that my own work channels the Beats, I can’t seem to write anything concrete about the Beat movement in relation to the three poets mentioned. Decadence seems to be easier, but I don’t know it as a movement.