Yesterday in class (or technically outside) when Dr. Mitchell was talking about the state of completion of Kubla Khan, I was instantly taken back to middle school. When I was in the 6th grade, my gifted class was doing a study on art, and my teacher was showing the class a painting by some famous artist. (Picasso, maybe? I really don’t remember) This painting was of a young boy, but it was obviously unfinished, and an entire corner of the painting was still a sketch drawing. I immediately asked my teacher why the painting was incomplete, but she only looked at me, smiled, and said that it WAS finished in the artist’s eyes.
I didn’t understand then, and part of my brain still doesn’t understand, why someone would purposely leave something unfinished. At some point today, though, something it hit me. Maybe the purpose in leaving the painting, and Kubla Khan, unfinished was simply to make us wonder. Sure, the painting of the little boy may have been finished the way a person would assume it should be... but on the other hand, the missing leg in the painting COULD have been a mermaid’s tail. When the work is incomplete, there is no limit to what a person’s mind can make it and to what it can become. Or, maybe Coleridge, in an egotistical mindset, just wanted you to be left with the image of himself as the one who "drunk the milk of paridise."
Commented on Katelyn Osborne's "Ecstatic Union and Drugs."
ReplyDeleteSee what I don't understand is how Famous author's and artist's like you just described can leave works unfinished, yet they still are masterpieces. I guarantee that if I, or any one of the people in honors were to write a magnificient research paper, and were not to finish because he/she wanted it to be left to the readers imagination, then that person would definitely fail the paper. No doubt about it. And what if a teacher asked you about your paper and you say "I was writing the most ingenious paper, but then someone killed my buzz, so I didn't want to ruin the masterpiece, so I left it unfinished." See, College students don't get as much leniency as those with fame, and personally, I blame it on the opium.
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