Telling Stories Telling Stories

It has become the niche of modern art, to not work with art to try to capture the unreal – but rather, to capture the real. Think about some movie, let's say Shrek. That's not a story about something we don't understand, it's a concept of love – translated in specifics. It's a perception of what love could be. Almost every movie does the same thing, turning concepts into specifics. When I look up 'Concept' on wikipedia, it's explained by a tree;

The originial tree in this picture is almost like a word, like love, or tree – the rest of the trees are all the different stories about trees. Now, while this seems perfectly natural, it doesn't mean that all stories have to be like this. What I propose is the other way of doing things – turning concepts into abstraction. It's a playful idea, but let's investigate what it would mean. Let's take love for example, or something broader, like what's the story about in the tale of Harry Potter? Wizardry? Good and evil? A true artist would probably say that the story has many themes, and a plot, and a protaganist, and a... – these are all the specifics of the tree, the branches, the leaves, etc – but in its essence, it really is just a story. The concept of Harry Potter is a story.

So what is a story? If we look the word up on wiktionary, we find that the word "story" comes from its origin in latin "storia", which in turn is derivation from historia, that is "learning through research". So what do we make of this? Not much. What I'm interested in, is how we can turn this into something fun, and the answer is "research through unlearning"! Now the tree is upside down:

What in the name of **** are we looking at now? Things are starting to get intersting!

Here the specifics are not only upside down, they are turned into a concept that doesn't even look like a tree, it actually looks more like some kind of fruit.

I can imagine that what the author of Harry Potter did just exactly this. She – working as a school teacher, explaining everything in terms of logic and reason, piling numbers and deriving vectors – probably, met a real magician. This wiz did something, something magical – something so profound that in a blink of an eye, her whole world was gone, pulled away like a blanket beneath her feet. And when the wizard walked away, she was left with nothing. She now realized how meaningless the school and her carrier was, since the existance of magic had shredded all into nothing. Thus she decided to write a book, a book that she breathed all her hope into – hope of meeting that wizard again...

And now I've completely lost where I was heading with this text, that's all for today. C u on thursdeh.