Reusable Parts

For as long as I can remember, my approach to analyzing the literary and artworks I encountered in high school—and achieving relatively high scores—has been to incessantly deconstruct them, breaking them down into manageable, rearrangeable components, effectively “coloring by numbers,” and fitting them into my own analytical framework. In doing so, I’ve lost the ability to truly appreciate them.

In truth, I despise focusing on the micro things because, in and of themselves, they lack inherent meaning. They are only imbued with significance by virtue of being part of a broader system. If disassembled and isolated, can they really be considered reusable? If we shatter everything down to its smallest parts, leaving nothing but a heap of fragments, is there still art in that? Is there still expression? When we look at a junkyard, the “beauty” we perceive comes from the potential promise of reorganization that the pile of debris offers. At this point, they no longer possess the essence of expression; “expression” actually occurs in our minds, and what is “being expressed” exists solely in our consciousness.

I believe that art cannot be decompressed, because the process of combining those microscopic elements is, in itself, the act of creating art. Decompressing art is akin to stripping the essence of art from an object. It reminds me of an experience I had long ago, perhaps in my second year of high school, when I suffered a high fever. In the agonizing state of being unable to sleep yet desperate to, I was plagued by recurring dreams, filled with what I wished to express. They floated in the air in the form of symbols, and I reached out to grasp them, but the more I tried, the more they vanished. After waking, I wrote my own perspective about this question in my journal (iphone notes): “The essence of human art is, fundamentally, the art of choice.”