The ‘collage’ approach will depend on how close you want to be to the words. By breaking down the fixed or singular point of view, you actually get inside the painting or text. You may merge, may even become matter.
The two different approaches have interesting implications. One could argue that ‘perspective’ denotes a choice for coherence of vision and for a hierarchy of images, where some figures and motifs will be more important than others. It would suggest that you subscribe to the notion of conveying a ‘message’ or ‘meaning’ since you are bringing forward a central narrative. You are the master of your domain, in charge of your fate, a reasoning man facing the chaos of creation. This sense of purpose and order, an expression of our need to understand, can only be achieved through illusions. ‘Reality’ in a work of art is there because of the contrast with what is not real.
One approaches and appropriates ‘reality’ through imagination. The human needs to invent himself and his circumstances, and identifies through projection. Understanding is a leap of the imagination. Writing, for instance, is moving forward through imagination. Writing is imagination projection. The reader/onlooker will be involved because he/she moves with the ongoing or unfolding observations setting off linkages and creating patterns. Movement, which includes turning back to where one has already been, is an attribute of consciousness. So is the establishment of a periphery because it creates the illusion of being centered.
‘Collage,’ on the other hand, will imply a more diffused vision, you could almost say a more democratic attitude; one accepts the ostensibly more natural and pragmatic assessment of two-dimensionality (this is a picture on a flat surface, not ‘reality’; this is a story, not ‘life’) as contrasted to the illusion of three dimensions suggested by perspective (this is an evocation or mimicry of ‘out there,’ which in your mind will become a reconstruction of ‘real life’). In ‘collage’ you are allowing, implicitly at least, for the autonomy of the means. Attention is sucked into the very surface of the text and to the material used. In painting, the ‘background’ as colors, contours and textures — not necessarily being anything more than paint — will be the environment contrasting or chiming with the ‘figures’ which stand out in the looking. In writing this environment will be language itself. You will work more with the text-ure and the immediacy of words as living organisms.
One may perhaps wish to go further by suggesting that these two ways of making, of engaging consciousness, have ethical repercussions. Certainly ‘perspective’ implies more authority, a stronger sense of generally accepted moral conventions, and a clearer conviction of what ‘identity’ is all about. ‘Collage’ could be interpreted as anarchistic, where one is not looking for Truth but for connections, and Reality would then be a point of view, a passage continually reinvented, recast, questioned, mediated and discarded.
TOWARDS THE END
Towards the end of the semester a nightmare pushes me back in time. I have managed to wing my way through class so far, sounding suitably knowledgeable without getting bogged down in the matter at hand. The trick is to keep the pace, the pose and the pitch, and use your age advantage like dead weight.
Now we meet for the last time. The school is built on the mountain slope looking down to the gray winter sea. The cold in New York can freeze off your cojones. I have asked for the windows to be opened so that the fresh smell of damp fynbos may fill the classroom. (Fynbos is the collective name for a number of odiferous shrubs indigenous only to the Western Cape.) Clouds and fog roll up the flanks, closing our view of the city. Low cover, alive and boiling, obscures distance.
I have my black teacher’s jacket on. Class has been running for a while when my old friend M walks in with a companion. I have known M for years. He is an agile go-between when it comes to bringing the paw of writing to the ear of public presentation. He is, forever, Mr. Fixit. Even when nothing is broken. Especially then. The gentleman with him is thickset with short hair of faded straw. M sucks his big front teeth, looks at me over the dirty eye-glasses perched on the tip of his nose, and announces with a gesture: “This is the inspector.” And he says, gesturing equally amiably in my direction: “Inspector, this is Mister D.”
The inspector, I understand, is to check and verify the groundedness of my teaching craft. I bow. He bows, rustling under his arm the sheaf of forms that must be completed. You’re welcome, you’re welcome. And so are you, sir. He then goes to the other end of the room where there’s a table covered with a black cloth reaching down to the floor. He will crouch under the table, out of sight except perhaps for a leg of hose sticking out. How will he see to do his work? Can darkness be penetrated? Does he have a pocket lamp? Or a secret lens? From there his voice is muffled when he asks the occasional question. “Life is a terrible business,” his choked voice says at a certain point. “It embraces the terror of territory.”
Oh, we manage to get to the end of class. It was no easy feat. I can tell you I was nervous as hell. The words in my mouth suddenly had another taste, awkward and of a faded chalkiness like that of pebbles, making the spittle flow copiously. I now took scant pleasure in the spiky gelled hair of the men and the youthful curves of the women. M watches the proceedings, grinning, the hands in front of his bulbous belly held fingertip to fingertip. This is his affable way of weighing words, particularly when they are slippery with saliva.
The final assignment was a story submitted by C, a good one as it turned out, culminating in a wedding ceremony with the couple of protagonists pronounced mistress and man.
But no, I’m lying again. C’s contribution was about the fable of the blackbird. It goes back all the way to the beginning of remembering when everything was still sung. Originally the future blackbird appeared in the Braytobook family coat of arms as a hand held out in some kind of protection. Later depictions showed it, black already but not yet gloved, plucking a harp. Times were unsettled and potentates thirsted for blood. The motif turned up as a clenched fist of war, smiting infidels. Then later still, in a country of full moon and fragrant nights, the hand, by now liberated from the shield, was recorded as writing songs of illicit love. It got itself arrested by the sultan’s goons, jealousy and intrigues were rife, and in due time it was sentenced to be amputated. His beloved in the alcove, peeping through the latticed window, fainted with a melodious moan when the blood started spurting. Ever since it has been this bird, balancing on the chimneypots and TV antennae of the city, and filling the air with its plaintive song. Since it took to roosting in the city of the dead it has also started looking after the corpses. In fact, it may now be seen as the incarnation of death, singing death’s songs to a dying sun.