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One of the most striking ideas that I took from class on Thursday was that we are all evolutionary processes creating things that have no meaning until we either attribute to or find meaning in them. For example, we create dreams in our sleep that may or may not have meaning to us while we are sleeping, and may or may not seem significant to us when we awake. Another example perhaps would be abstract art, which is a creation that may or may not have meaning or “intention” on the part of its author – it invites us, the viewers, to find meaning in the creation, or not, as we please. There’s not necessarily a univocal, fixed, given meaning either in our creations, our selves, or life broadly speaking that is waiting there to be discovered – we invent and alter meanings on the fly, filling in the open space for interpretation differently for each living participant or viewer.

As Kate pointed out, we are trained in English classes to analyze everything in order to further understand human culture. However, as Paul noted, perhaps meaning comes only after an evolutionary process – we are trained to interpret the world in various ways. Some things are either not interpretable or have no meaning underneath them lying in wait to be found out, to account or explain for them. A story just might mean nothing at all, as Paul’s English teacher taught him in middle school – it has whatever meaning you give it. This reminded me of a Mark Twain quote that it is a sin to put a moral in a story. Basically, Twain seems to be suggesting the alternative way of viewing art and stories as generative rather than disclosing when it comes to meaning. If we’re always searching for something of deeper significance, we might miss the beauty of the often-opaque mysteries that we are constantly immersed in.