Black and white. Straight lines, curved ones, and squiggles. Geometry.
His world and hers. The container and the contained. One within the other.
Form, matter, texture. Contrast and opposition. The language of
contradiction. Solidity and motion. Movement away from and toward
abstraction. Meaning.
He says meaning is everything and meaning has the law on its side. It's
useless, he says, to pretend otherwise. He sees and hears only meaning. He
says her art has none because language should be invisible. He doesn't under
stand her art because all he sees is words. He thinks that language and
meaning are two different things. Separate. Like the spirit and the flesh,
the body and the soul, form and content. He cannot grasp the idea that flesh
can be spirit, that the body can be soul, that form is content. He thnks
that meaning hides language and that meaning is self-evident. Meaning, he
says, is not visible because it is outside of language. It's eternal, like
the soul, and it floats around disembodied, waiting for someone to apprehend
it, lie the shadows and essences on the wall of Plato's cave.
(copyright 2007, Ben Stoltzfus and Judith Palmer)
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