There are things one cannot fully encompass with words, but the writer must always try; and failing sentence after sentence, he may write a poem. Yet, my goal here is far more prosaic than poesy and melody and song. I long to express a certain old truth, a certain affliction of man, a blindness that I’m sure there is a perfect word for out there, some sort of German portmanteau or even an apt Latin phrase: there is a type of blindness that comes of seeing what is in one’s mind, what, in some sense, one expects to see, and not the reality that is there. I know I have suffered from this. I have, at times, been ready to swear that some phrase or idea was in an article or book or song only to discover the whole thing my own invention.
The whole section in the Phantom Toll Booth with the Whether Man had a completely different turn and flavor on my first reading. It was only in some chance discussion and afterward, looking up the passage again, that I found I had completely read into the scene my own thoughts and feelings. Where on the page was a short paragraph about a muddle headed fellow who, lost in the consideration of possibilities, never moves on (one of the little Aesops the book is filled with) I had created of my own resources a kindly innkeeper whom the main character spent a few days with. I was sure the Whether Man had a whole chapter to himself. I remembered it plainly. It just doesn’t seem to exist.
This, I believe, a common, all too common, occurrence, so common that many, I fear, go through life never realizing that they are incapable of seeing anything that they are not in some way primed to see. Have you never yourself conversed with someone so confrontational that they cannot hear you agreeing with them, or talked to someone so unprepared for a different opinion that every counter, contradiction, or leading question is met with a sage nod and an undaunted march onto the next talking point?
Now, it is, I believe, the business of the artist to see the world clearly, that is, to burn away these phantasies between himself and reality, and yet, contradictorily, to then turn around and create them himself. He is, I think it has been said, a medium of sorts; he channels truth into images. The bare, naked truth he may never fully see, nor yet find the perfect incarnation for what glimpses he steals, but he is caught between. He is in some sense the lover of images and constantly struggling to tear them open, not to destroy, but to get underneath, like wrapping on Christmas presents. He wants the presents badly, and he also wants to give them. He will take great care in wrapping them up again and presenting them, re-presenting them. He wants so badly to communicate, to share with the world, what he has found.
Christmas presents, how apt to happen upon that image, for it was Christmas, it was one gift, where the greatest artist gave us His greatest art, and the truth, which no man can see, was finally seen.
Tale Told 