Without Answers

I've been reading a lot about art lately. One notion about artmaking stood out among many assertions: there's a human tendency to "close early on an idea." 

Yes. 

Whether a forklift operator or physician, that inclination to tick boxes, to iron it out, to get to the bottom, to solve and be satisfied, to close on an idea, and move on—we humans resist protraction, don't we? Waiting rankles. It can be uncomfortable. We don't like to not know. It feels like...losing. My words are not intended to criticize this type of thinking; I haven't read the book yet, but there's obvious value in both thinking fast and thinking slow. 

But art...it invites us to to think    s   l    o    w    to decelerate, to ease off...to pull ideas around us, closer, like a blanket, a weighted blanket. 

Have you seen the film Train Dreams? There's a scene—perhaps 90 seconds (?)—where one character's quick decision, his reluctant yet undeniable involvement, haunts him forever. He engages with an idea without thought, an idea with an alarming outcome, one he surely did not expect nor want, and this idea, this moment, the burden of it... he spends his life doomed by it.

Train Dreams does something so well: it emphasizes scale and image over discourse. With little dialogue, the film's director paints a stunningly beautiful portrait of a man and a life hinged on regret and loss and grief and the terrible and grand mystery of it all; he invites us to sit, sit without answers, sit and contemplate the whys.  

Perhaps I loved it so because my Dad was a logger? Perhaps I loved it because I revisited my past, even the difficult past with rash decisions and regrets? Perhaps it was the time and place, the nostalgia? Yet how am I nostalgic for days before even my grandfather's birth (1913)? Perhaps because I long for a slower past, where change didn't constantly hit us all like middle school spitballs? Yes yes yes...but perhaps mostly these themes, these ideas, the invitation to contemplate. 

Film, as an art form, invites us to inhabit a space, to walk in those shoes, to join the protagonist's journey (somehow making our own a little less lonely), and to reflect on the story it constructs on the screen but more so, within us—all stories are interior stories, aren't they? That's art. It gets inside us. And what does it do there? It challenges us, it stirs us, it pushes, but it repairs us too, it restores us, it soothes and settles us, if we allow it, if we unclose ourselves to the ideas.