Collage 240

Team Tolstoy member Lucy Zahner Montgomery sent the following comments after seeing yesterday's posting:

I love the neutrals you and Lynn have been doing - maybe because for me it brings more of a focus to the words and collage images. I don't know, but I love them.

Anyway, I read this passage a couple of times, and it actually made sense to me -

"... They evoke anonymous images of mystic implication. The lines move through the whole picture, knitting together a panorama of humanly motivated geature, each trapped within it own action and emotion -- a citadel of temporality, within a boundless and timeless space.... a panorama which decompartmentalizes human action..."

I would like to see the image it's describing.

Interestingly, I think it's also describing something that Tolstoy is trying to get at- "a panorama of humanly motivated gesture" - each character is so human, "trapped within it's own action and emotion" - I mean, if W&P were a giant painting, wouldn't it be a panorama of human actions and emotions - but how would you convey the movement through time and space, and the character's emotional growth (or not) that Tolstoy can convey through almost 2,000 pages of words -

One of the things I do in U.S. history class and my Asian Studies class is get 9th graders to look at images / paintings etc. and learn not only how to observe them, but how to describe them and how to see things in them. So I'm very interested in reading different descriptions of images. How can you use words to describe a piece of art, which is in itself perhaps made by an artist who is trying to depict something beyond mere words?

Perhaps words that attempt to describe something that is beyond words are doomed to sound pretentious...

Lola Baltzell
from page 487-488 of original text
collage
made 9/24/10