Assignment Week 4
Turkle discusses “we think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” A la Turkle’s discussion of “The Things That Matter,” pick an object from your life and discuss its meaning to you. Where does it take you? What are you able to understand? Describe the dynamic relationship between the object and your thinking.
Reading the selected essays on the subject of evocative objects led to many parallels to the relationships I have with the objects in my own life. While many objects in my life are meaningful, I will discuss one that I specifically use to think and be creative with – pens.
There has been a number of meaningful pens in my life. My mom studied caligraphy and, when I was young, her and I would write our names with fountain pens trying to get the florishes on each letter. My grandmother uses a specific type of red pen (which, strangely she has had a steady supply of for my whole life) that resembles a pencil but has a large protuding ball point. It gives her writing a particular characteristic that I have yet to see replicated. My favorite pen has been the Micron 0.3 black archival ink pen. I bought my first one when I was about 20. At the time, I began copying drawings in the covers of my favorite CD covers. I didn’t know how to draw but I found that the focus and the process were extremely calming and meditative for me during what could easily be classified as a moment of transition. I liked the infinite possiblilities of drawing, the variation of line weight and the shading effects produced by lots of small repetivie line stokes. Every creation was unique, never to be replicated in it’s exact form. The time it took to produce and the physical means on production encode situate the drawing in a particular point in time and give it meaning. A year later I switched into an art program where the Microns and I shared a fruitful multi-year partnership. I ventured into paint and water color, but the pen offered me the perfect balance of control over the output and limitless of design possibilities.
Years later I began to program computers. I started making drawings and “sketches” using code and was completely in love with the ability to “undo” any undesirable outcomes. Drawing in ink is very commital. Once you make the mark, you can’t go back. It makes you think and plan about the order of the actions in order to produce an outcome. Writing code is like throwing spagetti in the wall. You try one thing after another until something interesting happens. The accidents are as important as the goal. It’s perfect for quick experiementation but, even with all of the convenience it offers, it will never rival the relationship with my pen. Like Susan Yee’s experieance with the Le Corbusier digital archives, viewing art that is separated from the hand of the artist leaves something to be desired. While pen and paper may be ephemeral, I get the feeling that digital art never actually exists and it never belongs to me. The language and the code I wrote created the “drawing,” not my hand. The drawings I keep in my sketch books will always pull me back to the time and experiences where I created them. My digital files seem more like photos, like memories of artwork I once made.
On my keychain, I carry a compass. No explorer (I do not know how to properly use it, other than telling the direction I am facing), I put it on my keys because of its color: bright orange, the color of traffic cones, but translucent. I heard once that this is the most visible color to the human eye. So, I thought, I will never again lose my keys.
But one cannot simply have a compass as a fob or bauble. It begs to be taken in the hand and laid calm and flat so that it may perform the oracular work of pointing north.
I do this mostly on the train to and from campus. Before I had my little totem, my time on the train would be a noisy uncomfortable blur. Perhaps my brain, sensing the inevitability of the discomfort of modern life, would simply shut down the unimportant, thought-generating cortices until I emerged, suddenly conscious, at my stop. With my compass, however, the train is now a place of great concentration. I take it in hand and follow its quivering arrow constantly as the train ebbs, flows, and lurches. Instead of shutting down, blacking out, or falling asleep, I become almost deliriously aware of the position and direction of my body in space. But there is a rebounding effect: thinking of myself in space in turn makes me think of space itself, the East Bay and San Francisco and California and beyond. I imagine myself as if I were on a Google map.
I spend my life in a world that is constructed to human scale. This chair is the size it is because humans are the size they are. These keys are shaped the way they are because of the shape of my fingers. More importantly, I live in a city, a thoroughly architectural space. People talk of cities as “big,” yet my sense is that they are made actually of small, confined spaces: the apartment, the classroom, the coffee shop, the train car. I live in a series of rooms. The world is my size, and what a small size that is. T.S. Eliot said it best: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Perhaps feeling this constriction, thinkers in the 18th century, such as Kant and Burke, pondered what was known as “the sublime.” It was the feeling one experienced when confronted with something very much out of scale with the human–vast seas, mountains, or the infinity of stars. Perhaps this is not so different from what Czikzentmihalyi means when he describes moments “cosmic” awareness, when we perceive the “larger harmony” of all things while coming up against our limitations (192). As I hold my compass, I imagine myself as a negligibly small moving point on a vast globe. My mind shifts (if only for a second) into something like a cosmic or sublime scale.
I’ve never been prone to sentimentality. That’s not to say that I’m not want to express sentiments (gratitude, sadness, loving), but just that we were never a family that lingered in our emotions. And thus when it came time to decide on an engagement ring (bought retrospectively I might add…but that’s another story), I was quite blasé about the whole endeavor. Was I princess cut or baguette? White gold or platinum? Vintage or custom-made? I could’ve cared less. Would I really become attached to this object? Would it become part of me – a symbol of the undying love I felt for my husband that would eventually represent our fusion in…where, exactly? In my mind, I kept reliving the scene from “Gentleman Prefer Blonds” when Lorelei (Marilyn) debates the numerous parts of a woman’s body that she can wear her diamonds. Could I pull of this rouse? In the end, I chose something much more practical, something of use – a new watch.
So it came as a great surprise to me when, several years later, my Grandmother and Grandfather took me out to dinner and presented me with a box – the contents of which contained my great great great Grandmother’s sapphire ring – and I burst into tears.
My grandfather’s family has been in this country for nearly four hundred years – the second boat over following the Mayflower. Though I always knew that I was part of this very long American history – having been dragged to numerous DAR meetings, speeches, congregations seemingly overrun by women clad in Liz Claiborne suits smelling of Chanel N° 5 – I never really felt a connection its tradition as I felt I ought to. It was as if there was a fracturing between this bygone era and my own. The ties that bound these women, my ancestors, together seemed as if they’d been irrevocably severed. I just couldn’t envision how this heritage, my heritage, came to influence the woman I would eventually become.
But when my Grandmother gave me that ring, knowing that I hadn’t carried on many (if any) of her customs– the DAR, the country club memberships, the bridge groups, let alone the numerous boards of volunteer organizations that she sat upon, she seemed to be acknowledging that these were all inconsequential. What mattered was that I knew of where she came from, like her mother before her and her mother before her. What mattered was that I keep this ring and could look upon it in years to come and know that they had paved a road before me. What mattered was that I had the privilege and duty of handing it down to the next generation.
I wear my great great Grandmother’s ring every day. I see it as a bridge that connects me to this rich, varied, sometimes fraught, American tapestry of which I am a part. Like Machover’s cello, this is the object that is closest to me that I don’t share with others. I use it to reconnect with the forces that are beyond me. I see it as a bridge to the past and a liberating force. It has become, as Csikszentmihalyi posits, the object that integrates me to this lineage, but differentiates me from it as well. And in some way, I suppose it connects me this notion of cosmos or creation. Hence it would seem, in spite of myself, I have become sentimentalist.
When I was a child, I had a three-foot green toy tanker ship that I would take with me into the bath tube and into my bed. I loved that tanker because it helped me remember and imagine the giant tanker ships and other machines I saw on TV. My parents had a series of construction documentaries that I thoroughly enjoyed and that I re-watched several times. I loved machines of all sorts, and I had many mechanical toys. It was amazing to think of the colossal force, mass production, technology and possibilities of the machine. In my mind, these tankers, trains, robots, computers were magical things (and still are). It was the details that captured my fascination as well. It was interesting to analyze to space and design of tankers, of a motherboard, of a tank, and several other machine toys. They all were very meticulously designed.
I believe that the mechanical toys I had probably fueled my desire to be a designer. I like to create mechanical things such as architecture, computers, robots and machine products. I think the best aspect of the objects I grew up with is that it allowed me to imagine. Just as Tod Machover wrote about his Cello and how it allowed his ideas to percolate into his imagination, so did my green tanker and assortment of machine toys. That spark of imagination and curiosity that I experienced when I was young, carries on to today.
This course is already throwing into stark light the ways in which I am NOT “creative.” So I apologize.
In trying to decide what object to reflect on, I thought about Turkle’s comments on Freud and how the loss of an object can be devastating and can actually require a period of mourning. I thought about the objects in my life and those that would break my heart to lose. Of course, things like my laptop and iPhone came to mind, but mostly for the monetary setback I’d face having to replace them (and, let’s face it, with everything backed up to my cloud, the computer would continue to “exist” even without this particular machine!). I thought about my dog, but she’s not an object as she’s happy to remind me every time she demands a walk. When I first moved to Berkeley, my rather impressive jewelry collection, gathered over the course of years and many continents, was stolen and I was surprised at how quickly I got over the loss. No, the thing that would be most heartbreaking to me would be the loss of my book collection.
I was a young reader. I recall vividly the moment when I was four and reading suddenly “clicked.” It all fell into place and I was off. I spent a huge part of my childhood nibbling sunflower seeds and plowing through books, which my parents kept in good supply. Once I moved out, I insisted that my parents box up my childhood book collection instead giving them away and I continued to collect books afterward. While I respect library users and those who love their ereaders, my books are purchased and quickly broken in: before anything, my name goes in the cover, I’m happy to dog-ear pages, bend spines to get better access, underline passages. When I travel, the margins and back pages of books become mini journal entries and address books of people I meet. Years later, I will open a book and a train ticket from Bangkok to Chang Mai will fall out or a pressed California poppy picked while hiking the PCT will fall into my lap. My books become artifacts of very particular moments in my life. I’m fortunate to have a memory that allows me to recall where I was when I read various books or to return to books to re-read passages again.
This having of books almost feels compulsive. After completing my undergraduate degree in English literature in England, I begged a good friend to store the boxes of books I’d accumulated in her parent’s home. Two years later, I flew back to London armed with three empty suitcases and brought my collection home with me. When I move to a new place, the books are the first things that are unpacked – once they’re on the shelf, I’m home.
I understand that in some ways, I allow my books to define who I am. They are an important part in how I perform myself. I define myself by my books, by how much and what I read. There is a snobbery in this, I suppose, but I really do feel like I would lose part of myself without them. They are a reference to me and mark my trajectories through life. The copy of Little House on the Prairie that my father read to me as a child sits next to my recent copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting; I form my thoughts on my life story through my collection.
When I was 18 years old I began to keep a journal. At first, this journal was an emotion dump that acted as a pressure release. I could write, and then in some way I had also felt, so I could move into the present. I wrote in this journal for 17 years, and in that time my thinking process became inextricably intertwined with my journal writing.
The journal began as a single subject school notebook, but as the years passed, the accumulated journal included at least 15 books of various sizes and styles, from the original and now tattered red single subject spiral-bound notebook to the more sophisticated and stylish black ‘moleskin’ journal. The whole set became an ‘object,’ in Turkle’s idea of object.
As I grew older, this journal became an anchor to my past and to experiences that influenced my choices (to not get married, to continue with school, to not have children, to live, in short, an alternative life for a woman). Because my journal recorded painful memories, it became for me a hair-shirt that I would periodically wear to feel bad about myself. Re-reading certain parts of my life became the obsesive and painful exercise akin to running your tongue relentlessly against a sore tooth (does it still hurt? Ouch! Yes, it still hurts). My journal took me back to being an 18-year-old girl who’s poor choices cost other people their lives. I loved my journal for that, for allowing me to look back to 1987, reflect again, and try to make sense of that part of my life from an older and older person’s perspective.
I used my journal to reflect on 1987 through the eyes of a 25 year old, a 30 year old, and last a 35 year-old. Even now, when I’m old enough to be the mother to my younger self, I see the pages I wrote in my minds eye and have a different perspective. I can now write back, if I wanted to, to my 18-year-old self and give some comfort and compassion and love. I’ve been told that we are always all of our ages. My journal allowed me to keep fresh those painful memories until I grew up enough to provide my own solace.
When I was 35 I felt this object, my journal, had too much weight in my thinking about myself. It had transformed from an object that helped me think to an object that influenced my thinking. I could not move past my history as long as I could go back and re-read my journal. The set of volumes, heavy and dusty, came to symbolize a tie to a person I no longer needed to be, so I burned them. And as I destroyed that object, I felt loss and grief and love and gratitude for being able to have something so tangible to destroy.
For someone who loves technology and studies computer science, I have a strange attachment to paper. Despite the fact that everything nowadays has a more portable digital form, thanks to pdfs, power points, email, Kindles, iPads, and smart phones, I often prefer the paper version of something to its advanced digital counterpart. Something about the tangibility of turning a page, the feeling of making a mark on paper with a pen, really resonates with me. Given the choice between a pdf and a textbook, I will often go for the textbook. Or between taking notes in a physical notebook and taking notes on the computer, I will go for the notebook. In fact, I love notebooks. As a kid, I kept journals in composition books, detailing my thoughts, my day, and other highly embarrassing childhood memories. Today, I have an unhealthy obsession with Moleskine notebooks, and I still journal daily, as well as brainstorm and keep track of my weekly priorities, in paper notebooks.
Perhaps it’s because I spend so much time on the computer that I value my paper and notebooks so much. Paper is private and personal, and allows me to think and to create without dealing with the distractions of technology. Maybe it’s the simplicity of paper that speaks to me. A blank piece of paper speaks of so much opportunity to create and to think, to draw and to write out my thoughts, more than a laptop that already contains hundreds of files and applications, not to mention the Internet, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time. In a life of chaos, much of it brought about by technology, paper is my tie to a simpler world, a more tangible world, where a blank, uncluttered page inspires so much creative possibility.
When trying to think of an “evocative object” featuring prominently in my life, no images swarmed my mind, but waves of music broke into my consciousness as if they had been waiting eagerly in the wings for this very assignment. In order to trace my cultivation of the object through aesthetic perception, flow of psychic energy, and goals as did Csikzentmihalyi (1981), I’ll reminisce about my teenaged love affair with one particular gentleman – the musician Jeff Buckley.
As Csikzentmihayi notes is probable, my early relationship with Jeff Buckley’s music was purely a means of differentiating myself from the others around me, answering for myself and others the question “Who Am I?” Equipped with a hot pink portable cd player and his first album “Grace,” which would quickly grow scratched from overuse, I’d lay on the floor of the school bus on the way to academic and track meets, escaping the bustling noise of my classmates to immerse myself completely in the rumbling of the bus against my back and the plaintive melodies of the artist. I thought (and still think, actually) that his voice was so…true…that it was as if he opened your veins and poured his feelings directly into your blood – sometimes I would open my eyes suddenly, startled by the sheer beauty I felt in that connection. Without realizing it, I was using the very act of “perception,” or valuing through aesthetic experience the “inherent qualities of the object,” to craft my identity (Csikzentmihalyi 179). In my teenaged mind, my trips into Jeff’s Buckley’s world amounted to something special, something far more important and sublime than the brief interactions my classmates seemed to have with the pop songs blared on the bus’s radio. In this case, my goal was to be known to myself and others as a “music-lover,” a curator of singer-songwriters’ tomes of work, and I set about directing my “psychic energy” fervently to that task. During family fishing trips, I’d perch myself on the end of the pier with my cd player well away from my parents and brother and reach out to him across the calm water – “There’s the moon asking to stay/ long enough for the clouds to fly me away / Well it’s my time coming / and I’m not afraid / afraid to die.” I felt personally entrusted to these words, as if he was confessing something to me, and I was the keeper of his song. This made me feel elevated, different from my family and friends and uniquely “me.”
Though I’ll always think nostalgically of the intensity of feeling I experienced as a teenager listening to Jeff Buckley, his music has transformed for me throughout the years as my goals have changed. No longer as concerned with my individual identity, I am now, as Csikzentmihalyi predicted, more interested in using his music as an object for integration rather than differentiation, for exploration of my social self and even cosmic self as well as individual self (192). While listening to Jeff Buckley’s sad notes, I used to reflect on his early death by drowning and wallow in the unfairness of it all; now, I cling to the beauty and fleeting nature of life, resolving to savor the moments I have. I used to shut myself up in my bedroom with the lights off when listening to “Hallelujah,” consciously choosing to distinguish my choice of activity from my parents’ (usually watching basketball); now, I sing “Hallelujah” at parties, asking my mother to harmonize with her beautiful voice, weaving one more layer of significance into this living object, which has grown as I have grown.
While I was reading the material for this class, I could not stop thinking about the objects I packed one time I thought I was never going to go back… Yes, I did the exercise of going through all my stuff and choosing those very special objects I would take with me if I were to leave and never come back. I included things I thought I would need such as, underwear and comfy clothes, and the thing I did not want to detach from: my bag of papers.
Every time I travel or I simply come across paper I like and I feel I will want to work with at some point, I will take it and put it in my bag of papers. In that bag I have cardboard, colored paper, recycled paper, wooden paper, envelopes, origami paper, adhesive paper, you name it… And all those papers are in waiting in that bag for one reason: to be part of a gift, a note, a letter, or a card to someone loved.
Yes, my bag of papers is filled with beautiful and diverse kinds and shapes of paper. But what makes it really special is what I would eventually use the contents of it for, to express my affection to someone else, i.e. to strengthen my interpersonal relations in Csikszentmihalyi’s words. Then, that bag not only has a touch, a look, a smell and a feel; but also a past, a present and a future.
Reflecting back on all the objects that I have grown up with, it has been hard to find just one that has meaning for me. However, after time and consideration I have chosen the object that has meant the most to me, in a strange way. I have this necklace that was given to me by my biological mother when I was 13, a week after I found out I was adopted. In order to fully understand the importance of this necklace though you need a little background on my scenario. I was adopted from birth, due to the life that my biological mother had led. She did not have the ability to take care of me, and was deciding between an abortion and giving me up for adoption. Luckily my adoptive parents were looking to adopt and got me just in time. Therefore, like what Turkle states, this necklace that my biological mother gave me has a very rare status. It has also acted as a sign for something else. Every time I see it, it acts as a sign, the first element, standing for hope, the second element, with gives me the thought that I can do anything and be successful at it, which is the third element. Similarly to when Turkle is talking about art in chapter seven, this necklace has more symbolic context in it than the expressive possibilities of it itself. If a stranger would have given me this necklace I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, however, the fact that it was from my biological mother has added much importance. Oddly enough, this necklace hasn’t inspired me to wear necklaces, I think I have actually only worn this one a few times. But, I have a relationship with this object. It has become a token for motivation, and for determination. I think that many of the things in my life are similar. They don’t represent my past, but they guide me in my future.
As a 2 year old I loved being in the water. I would run into the pool with my clothes on, not knowing how to swim just to feel the fluid water on my skin. Soon after my parents bought me a pink swimsuit so that my dad could start teaching me how to kick, blow bubbles, and move my arms through the water. Today, my swimsuit floods my mind with many memories, emotions, and nostalgia. As Turkle states, wearing my swimsuit I become one with it as I dive into the water, entering a “voyage to a new world”. My swimsuit is the only thing I bring into this new world and the only thing that I take out. Each swimsuit I have captures memories, each one associated with specific uses including beach time, swim practice, or water polo games. My purple swimsuit the one that lets me relax into a world of freedom. This swimsuit would allow me to escape, glide around on the bottom of the pool floor, swim slow laps at the beach, or follow the reflection of the sun underwater. In this purple swimsuit all of the outside noise of reality disappears, and suddenly I am immersed in something beautiful, a feeling of being unlimited. My blue swimsuit is one that I would wear for swim practices, one that can slide the water right off it in order to gain speed to beat the other swimmers. This blue swimsuit fits uniform to my body and allows me either to focus on swim times or on a song to play in my head. These songs will play over and over while I stare at the bottom of the pool, swimming back and forth until practice ends. Then, there’s my black swimsuit for water polo practice and games. This swimsuit requires thickness and endurance to get through endless hours of practices. This black swimsuit went through carrying chairs, sweat, and wrestling. These swimsuits carry complex meanings and associations with relaxation, concentration, stamina, win, and loss. These swimsuits were with me everyday, through every season, and through every year, so much that I used to joke that I lived most of my life in the water. It was in the water that I was able to express myself in different ways, and this mindset and attitude has shaped my lifestyle today. Everyday when I look at my swimsuits in the corner of the room, I remember who I am and how I’ve gotten to where I am today.
During the time I was in elementary school, I remember one object as he was the drum major for marching band during his junior and senior years in high school. Gloves. These gloves served its purposes: facilitating the use of the mace in which he would have to create a routine and ‘beat time’ with, and being more visible to the band as the drum major conducted on top of the podium. For me, the nature of the gloves had many meanings for me. Copying the motions of my brothers in his conducting patterns, I felt as if I had some control over the music as different motions were used to control tempo, dynamics, and entrances of various sections. The other part of having the gloves also meant that I was a leader with responsibilities, and a model of a person to look up to. Eventually, I actually became a drum major my senior year and experienced this reality.
But, as I look back as to why I loved the gloves so much, it is because I loved being in that leadership type role in which I had to manage and organize people, where I had the pressure of being a role model to the younger people and even among my own peers. Right now, I still see myself as one wearing the ‘gloves,’ where I do not conduct music anymore, but am involved in greater things as I try to be a leader and an older brother in my campus fellowship. Rather than loving the power that I might get from being in control, I am humbled to be in the position that I can be a part of something that isn’t just done for the fulfillment of my own desires, but for the betterment of other people. The ‘gloves’ have taken on a new meaning for me, in which I take hold of my responsibilities in a different perspective.
As I read Sherry Turkle’s “Evocative Objects: Things We Think With”, I was struck by how we all have evocative objects in our lives and how these objects have rich connections to our daily lives as well as our intellectual practice. For me, my evocative object is my journal, where I place my thoughts, memories, fears, hopes, frustrations, joys, anxieties, plans, sorrows, and victories down in writing.
This physical act of putting pen on paper and pouring out my honest thoughts allows me to transform my inner emotions into words. Journaling is my way of capturing snapshots of notable events in my personal life. These private records have the power to time-travel me back to past events in my life, allowing me to connect to my heart and mind at the time of the event.
When I read through old entries, they bring tears, laughter or joy to me and remind me of where I came from, what I have learned about the world and myself, and how I have grown and developed into who I am now. My journal, although slightly worn down on the exterior through the years, contains interiors powerful enough to help me cognitively think about the reality of who I am and my place in the world.
My family has a four-and-a-half foot tall Christmas tree at home that’s been around for almost twenty years. It’s an artificial tree with plastic needles sticking out of wire limbs and a detachable tripod base. Csikzentmihalyi would probably name this a symbol of social integration; my parents acquired this tree shortly after we came to America, despite being not particularly religious. (I spent several years of my childhood trying to convert them to Christianity before succumbing to agnosticism.) For my family, Christmas was something that didn’t exist before coming to the United States. Even then, I remember explaining to my parents why we were to hang socks up during the holiday. They eventually got it.
I remember physically outgrowing that tree. There was a stuffed silver star strapped to the top branch, which I used to take down and wave around as a magic wand. Over the years, as we moved several times, the tree came with us, U-Hauled across about a dozen states. We kept it not because it was valuable or even particularly aesthetic – it wasn’t new when we got it and the branches stuck out at awkward angles. There was talk some years of getting a new, larger tree, or perhaps even a live one. Now, however, the tree has been established as a family tradition and its presence during the holidays is a given. When guests come over my mom gets to point to it and say that that’s the tree we had in Ohio. To me, this tree represents the generational/cultural differences between my mother and father and my sister and me, and the family bonds that connect us together.
When I was trying to think of an object that I think with the first thing I thought of was board game pieces.
In one sense, the connection is fairly obvious: board game pieces arrayed across a board are a nearly straightforward externalization of thought processes. I am an avid fan of the game of Go, and one definitely gets the sense as one plays that the pieces and patterns on the grid are something like indexical traces of the two players’ thoughts and strategies — they can even look a bit like ripples on a liquid surface or the vibratory patterns of Chladni plate. The pieces on the board establish parameters for the players’ internal strategies, and those strategies in turn on reflected back onto the board, back and forth throughout the game.
But, as I thought longer about my connection to board game pieces, I realized that they were evocative objects for me in a more imaginitive, day-dreaming make-believe way. As a child, I probably spent more time playing with game pieces *outside* the rules of the game than inside. The small-scale, evocative thinginess of the pieces invites a more creative reimagining of what they could be used for, instead of just what they “should” be used for. Just as I loved to imagine fictional backgrounds and adventures for my plastic legomen, an array of game pieces seemed like the tip of some sort of bigger, hidden system of meaning behind them, and it was fun to sit around and think about possible other situations/games to use them in. At the same time, the pieces were compelling on a purely physical level — there’s just something satisfying about a little wooden or plastic object.
As an “adult,” I still feel this strange compulsion to imagine/admire board games more than actually play them. I find myself watching video blogs about board games that I have never played and never plan to play, simply because there is something aesthetically compelling and satisfying about a set of pieces that are arranged in an open-ended system of rules, halfway between mimetic representation and abstract fantasy, halfway between constricting rules and endlessly open imagination.