Popsicle Philosophy
One of the useful things about imagery is that it is subject to a certain amount of interpretation. An author can certainly intend imagery to represent a very specific and definite thing and often does. But it is certainly a requirement. Very often, in fact, the best use of imagery is one that forces the reader into being a more active participant. It is imagery that gets the reader asking, “what is this supposed to mean?”
In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality.” The other responds, “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy.” Both of the Popsicles are melting off their sticks.
Interpretative Imagery
And then there are those occasion when the imagery that does belong to the author is introduced expressly for the purpose of interpretation. The reader can still be encouraged into a mode of active participation, however, by virtue of the author providing an alternative interpretation outside the mainstream:
“I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in The Shining in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror…But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me…part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted.”
Mortality
One of the most straightforward and paradigm-quaking examples of imagery in the book is a single line of observation, directed explicitly toward the person holding the book in their hand, about the nature of mortality. It is an image that few who have never been parents forced to jump to action before a curious toddler places something into their mouth which should definitely not be there would consider and, even more to the point, most who have been parents will not have taken the time to contemplate. Therein lies the differences between the life that is examined and the life that is merely experienced:
“You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring.”
Home Sweet Home
Amidst all the philosophical and metaphysical and socio-sexual imagery which dominates the narrative with literary allusions and lofty language and ambiguously circling vortices of logic, there can occasionally be found some examples of plain, old-fashioned use of imagery that seeks to do little more than enhance and intensify description. Such as almost uncomfortably quaint and old-fashioned description of setting:
“Eventually we found a house on a hill with gleaming dark wood floors and a view of a mountain and a too-high rent. The day we got the keys, we slept together in a fit of giddiness on a thin blanket spread out over the wood floor of what would become our first bedroom. That view. It may have been a pile of rough scrub with a stagnant pond at its top, but for two years, it was our mountain.”
