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Poetry and Comics: the Necessity of Variety in Medium (Part 1)

Every person in the world lives in his or her own private theater. Although I would assert that we all may perceive the same noumenalogical reality (that is to say, reality is precisely what it is regardless of varied experiences), we are each aware of different parts of that reality, and we each have unique experiences.

Although it is beautiful that people can have so many different strengths, the inability to fully understand each other’s experiences firsthand causes a great deal of problems for humanity. People can easily drift toward selfishness and misunderstanding, because we cannot truly and completely see the world from another person’s point of view.

What are we to do? We as humans have crafted a societal lifestyle in which our success and happiness in life is largely contingent upon our abilities to relate to other people. Our minds can process the world around us and we can think and feel and react to our experiences--but this leaves each and every person with a unique subjective perspective of reality.

Scott McCloud describes this dilemma as the wall of ignorance. He asserts that art acts as a medium of communication. The word medium quite literally means “middle.” A unique thought may travel as a message from one mind through a medium (such as poetry or comics) to another mind. Of course, the medium and the minds involved do change the message, so it is very important to pay attention to the form that we use to communicate ideas. The more we know about how a medium functions, the better we can use it to communicate with each other.

(Both images are from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art from Harper Paperbacks, 2004. I highly recommend this book--you should also check out his website in the links section of this blog.)