Narrative, the Past, and Beyond 3
A new year was here. I had new thoughts. I could see new possibilities.
These groupings, these concepts, these titles have stewed for a month and more. It was now time to look at them again. A month ago, my wife assured me the card ideas were better, but she was not convinced that each deck of cards should be as large as they were, feeling that there was repetition in the types of images, and that kind of problem could water down the impact.
I counted the cards in each deck. Four of the five decks were exactly 49 cards. I liked the uniformity of it, and I felt it was the perfect size, but now I was also noticing that some of these drawings were just filler, to pump up the deck to the proper number. Again, she was right. I was going to have to cut them down.
But then, as I was looking through the cards and yet again, I was hard-pressed to remember which title and concept belonged to which deck. I was flipping through each stack, and I was wondering if this one was about situations and that one was about thoughts. It gave me an inkling about just how crucial the titles were. Ultimately, the concepts didn’t seem to matter.
But this was not disconcerting. So what if the titles were not essential! They worked for each group regardless, and even more importantly, they didn’t confuse. They did nothing more than provide a single focus. And that was not bad.
It was all about simplicity. You might want to instill one work of art with the entire universe as you can see it, but it won’t help that work at all. Why instill an old body of work with a narrative when it never apprehended one? It was always best to keep it simple.
And if a random viewer could find a narrative between the pictures — some all-encompassing sequential directive with conspiracies and character flaws and everything else — then all the better.
