A Note on Anodyne Verbosity
My last two posts likely show that I'm headed for that direction. Isn't it funny how the word "last" can mean preceding, or final?
I've been needlessly verbose in my last two posts, subconsciously trying to adopt a more erudite and sagacious tone. Part of that is due to my conviction being that the more complex the words in my writing are, the less likely it’ll read across as conceited. Of course, that usually tends to occur if the substance of the words is dissonant or perceived by the reader as non-existent— so perhaps it’s a subconscious apology for failing to justify my convictions adequately. Or perhaps this is a way to quell the anticipation of a future conflict.
Perhaps, if they spend all their energy trying to comprehend what I’m saying, they won’t have enough left to question it. By taking refuge in currents of grandiloquence, I could reside in the illusion of depth without capsizing my ego. With all these words at my fingertips, I can construct a bridge connecting my thoughts to a reader’s, and tenebrous ambiguity will lead to a less cauterising pilgrimage.
On another space song note, let’s take a moment to examine this image. With the exception of edgy contrarians (tongue-in-cheek; I often act this way), anyone can appreciate the beauty of this photo. In the voidness of space, the nebula appears to be summoning us—like a siren, but promising salvation, instead of leading sailors to their watery graves—it’s reminiscent of the movie Cube, where Kazan wanders out into the light1. Or some kind of Gustav Doré illustration2.
What makes it so enigmatic? I’m partial to the colour arrangement, but how many principal colours are there? Violet, white, pink, black and blue; with five colours, reality (and our own scientific ingenuity) presents to us a image worth looking at. And yet, the way in which the colours complement each other gives rise to more minor colours, and reaches out to us. It’s the surrounding blackness that functions as the grounding negative space.
This picture acts as a beautiful analogy to other contexts; perhaps one only needs to introduce a few initial starting points to attain an elevated depth. Complexity can be an emergent property, instead of one artificially embedded. It just needs an undertow of space.
I don’t want to dilute this post into an often-said blanket “simplicity is key” message— the line between simple and simplistic can be very blurry, and can be the Pandora’s Box to many straw-man arguments. What I’m positing is that there needs to be some space to define what is there. If I threw every single colour at a canvas, it’d resemble a disjointed visual experiment more than anything (a rainbow is memorable because it resides in the space provided by a grey sky, often solely ameliorated by a simple petrichor).
In that same vein, as I type words onto an indigo screen (an aesthetic consequence of my sophomoric, pseudo-goth sympathies), it’s necessary for some words to pierce through the space created by others, in order to matter. Otherwise, I’ve fallen into the trap of handing a thesaurus to the reader. My apprehension towards being dismissive and impermeable to other perspectives manifests into obfuscating my own. But I believe in order to say something meaningful, one has to be willing to offend; not necessarily through caustic denigration, but through challenging others’ current intellectual comfort, whilst providing the space for them to challenge you in return.
It will always be a cauterising pilgrimage—led on by the hope of being less mistaken than before—but it prevents the abscesses of ignorance. Perhaps the road to civil discourse shouldn’t lie in semantic overload, but in the anchor of the gentle—and perhaps unsaid—words quietly defining the others.
Cube is a 1997 horror movie, wherein Quentin, Kazan, Rennes, Worth, Leaven, and Holloway are trapped inside a cube, laced with deadly traps. I actually haven’t watched it, but saw some clips of it; the end shows Kazan walking out.
There’s a fair bit of gore preceding the scene, so I won’t link it.
Isn’t it heavenly?
Petrichor. Thank you, I just learned a new word! Now I must hasten to use it -- probably in a tortured George Costanza way -- so that I won’t forget it. Plus, I do appreciate that you have, so far in my reading, used actual photos or pictures of artwork and not the demonic AI generated “art”.