{"id":1073,"date":"2012-08-06T16:26:53","date_gmt":"2012-08-06T16:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2012-08-06T16:26:53","modified_gmt":"2012-08-06T16:26:53","slug":"why-did-you-use-the-strings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/?p=1073","title":{"rendered":"Why Did You Use the Strings?"},"content":{"rendered":"

onlyifyoufinishedpapertowns<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Where did the strings metaphor inPaper Towns\u00a0come from?<\/p>\n

Someone said it to me once, after a friend had attempted suicide, that \u201cmaybe all the strings inside him broke,\u201d and I liked that image a lot because 1. puppets, and 2. We are all aware that there is this emotional\/psychological life inside of us, right? But it\u2019s very difficult to talk about, because it doesn\u2019t have a physical location.<\/p>\n

When your back hurts, it\u2019s relatively easy to address this problem using language: You say, \u201cMy back hurts,\u201d and I can understand what you mean, because I also have a back, and it has hurt before, and I remember that pain, which makes it easier for me to empathize with you.<\/p>\n

It is much harder for me to empathize with you if what hurts is abstract. When people are imagining sadness or despair, they often try to render it in terms we find familiar. You often hear, \u201cMy heart hurts,\u201d for instance, or \u201cMy heart is broken.\u201d This problem, of course, is not actually in the heart.<\/p>\n

(I do think a lot of people feel emotional pain physically near the solar plexus, but it\u2019s not the physical manifestation of emotional pain that makes it so difficult: It\u2019s the emotional\/psychological\/spiritual\/whatever pain\u00a0itself<\/em>, which you can\u2019t describe easily in concrete terms.)<\/p>\n

To talk about emotional pain (and lots of other emotional experiences), we are forced to use abstractions. (\u201cMy heart is broken,\u201d is a symbolic statement.) And many people feel, in this world driven by data and statistics and concreteness, that abstractions are inherently kind of\u00a0less valid\u00a0<\/em>than concrete observations. But emotional experience is as real and as valid as physical experience. And the fact that we have to use metaphor and symbolism to describe that pain effectively does not make it less real\u2014just as abstract paintings are not inherently inferior to representational paintings.<\/p>\n

You often hear in high school English classes, for instance, that thinking about symbols is dumb or useless or \u201cruining the book.\u201d But underneath it all,\u00a0this is why we have language in the first place<\/em>. We don\u2019t really need language to share the news of your back pain: You can point at your back and grimace to tell me that your back hurts, and I can nod sympathetically.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But to explain to you the nature and nuance of my grief or pain or joy, I need abstractions. I need symbols. And the better our symbols are, the more clearly we\u2019ll be able to communicate with each other, and the more fully we\u2019ll be able to imagine each other\u2019s experience. Good symbolism makes empathy easier.<\/p>\n

So why the strings? The strings inside a person breaking struck me as a\u00a0better and more accurate abstract description of despair than anthropomorphized symbols (broken heart, etc.).<\/p>\n

And this is very important to remember when reading or writing or painting or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

onlyifyoufinishedpapertowns: Where did the strings metaphor inPaper Towns\u00a0come from? Someone said it to me once, after a friend had attempted suicide, that \u201cmaybe all the strings inside him broke,\u201d and I liked that image a lot because 1. puppets, and 2. We are all aware that there is this emotional\/psychological life inside of us, right? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[678,671,675,673,676,672,670,674,677],"class_list":["post-1073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-despair","tag-emotional","tag-english","tag-pain","tag-paper-towns","tag-psychology","tag-sadness","tag-symbols","tag-the-strings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmblr.kamilah.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}