Month: October 2006

Way back in the way back machine, I worked as proof reader, researcher and indexer for a couple of volumes of Tennesse Williams’ letter. It was alternately tedious and fascinating work with long hours divided between reading backwards – an old proof reader’s trick for catching mistakes when your eyes are going numb – and scanning microfilm archives like someone from a 70’s newspaper drama. It paid well, I set my own hours and I got to read as much mid century American drama and fiction as any young English major could hope for. As a result, I’ve read almost everything Williams’ ever wrote including unpublished letters, journals, half-finished plays and more versions of the Orpheus Descending story line than anyone should ever have to sit through. Out of all that reading there’s a couple of images that stick incredibly vividly in my mind. One is the image of the stairs to the roof in the play of the same title.

Stairs to the Roof for those fortunate enough not to have read it, is a fairly early stage in the evolution of The Glass Menagerie. As a play its turgid, overly fantastic and disasterously sincere. But the image of the stairs to the roof – where succor from the industrial world awaits the protagonist – stuck with me. Along the way it got blended with the image of the metal fire escape stairs that feature in The Glass Menagerie, stairs that had their own associations with escape from social and familial responsibilities. In my mind the stairs were always metal and rusting, slightly bent and held to the buidling with crumbling bolts. Rickety in the extreme and the kind of place an unlucky person would manage to catch tetanus in an instant, they held promise none the less. The promise of a life beyond the Celotex interior or, to update the reference, a life beyond the cubical walls.

That image stuck with me as I took my own journey through cube land and eventualy beyond. The stairs remained always rickety and rusty, until I saw this picture of Rex’s over on Stills. I immediately saw the stairs to the roof. The materials are entirely different from what I’ve always imagined, but those are the stairs. The decay and decrepitude of them are utterly perfect. I can almost smell the mold, a far richer smell than the one exuded by the formerly rusty metal stairs.

I offer this as a data point in the ongoing debate regarding the purpose of art and the broad question of what art is and is not. A fairly common line of thought holds art as a communicative act. If art is communication, then how do concepts like intenitonality and message figure in a case such as this where a work inspires thoughts that the artist could have had no knowledge of? If we judge a work on its ability to communicate a message, then what kind of metric are we left with when the association is one of chance? Admittedly, this particular photo is quite good, even if you don’t have your own vivid mental associations to go with it. But with those associations its elevated to the sublime.