11/8/2023 0 Comments Storytelling arc![]() ![]() And as we read, we travel not just through places portrayed in the story but through the narrative itself. ![]() Next we might develop another layer of “vision,” sensing elements that give the story structure: a late scene mirrors an earlier one, or a subtle use of color tints the whole. Then we pass through the words’ looks and into their meanings, absorbing a stream of visual images conjured by the language. ![]() Northrop Frye puts it this way: “We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we ‘see’ what he means.” John Berger atomizes further: “Seeing comes before words.” We first apprehend text as texture-blurry or dense, black on white-and perceive each word as a picture (the part of our brain that recognizes words has a twin that recognizes faces). I’m saying see because we often think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, but it’s visual, too a story’s as much garden as song. And when a reader’s done-levitation! She looks down and sees how she’s traveled, the pattern of the whole. We then create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. Gray’s way of working from life to art could also describe writing: writers go about their observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns-ways in which experiences shape themselves, ways we can replicate these shapes with words. I love how Gray made this house, and really love how much it maddened bombastic Corbu. On plans she drew lines showing how you could move, look, and live in this house: natural pathways transformed to design. A mouthlike entry pulled you in screens and mirrors unfolded from walls windows and shutters opened in all directions for the right air, light, or view. The house she then built on rocks by the sea expressed this organic choreography. To start designing, she studied how she and her housekeeper moved through the day and made diagrams of their motions and those of the sun to reveal natural patterns-loops in the kitchen, deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room. Corbu had declared that a house was “a machine to live in,” but Gray thought, No: a house is a person’s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. In 1926, an Irish designer named Eileen Gray built a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that drove the famed architect Le Corbusier wild. ![]()
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