The General
When I was little, before I was old enough to build Legos, I played with Playmobil. Playmobil figures have melon-shaped heads, smiles on their faces, and semicircular hands that can grip a multitude of Playmobil objects. Most figures come in boxed sets with vehicles or structures. I especially liked sets with pirate or police themes. I had a small fleet of pirate ships and police vehicles manned, respectively, by pirate and police figures. All of the pirates and all of the police were led by one man: The General.
The General came with one of the pirate sets. A golden cutlass hung from his gold belt; golden epaulets adorned his shoulders; a blue tri-corner hat with gold trim and a white feather rested atop his white hair. (Yes, The General really liked gold. In addition to the gold on his personage, he hoarded gold coins and trinkets in a vast number of treasure chests. He also took great pride in his white powdered wig.) The pirates despised The General even before I unboxed him. They knew he wanted to rule them, and they knew he wasn’t a pirate—he was a rich foreigner who sought to develop an empire.
Naturally, with loyal lieutenants and a well-equipped imperial army, The General conquered and ruled the pirates. Unlike the pirates, the police, rather than resist The General, forged a strong alliance with him. The police actively helped him maintain control of the pirates. They arrested and jailed rebel pirates until no pirate retained the will to rebel.
The General’s story was one story of many that I told with Playmobil. My sister had her own Playmobil sets, too. So did my cousins. We would often share the stories of our Playmobil figures. Worlds and characters intersected as we cultivated an imaginary oral history of our Playmobil. We did what children do. We told stories. We were storytellers. Now my Playmobil figures rest in bins stored in an attic. The General’s reign is over. But his reign didn’t end because I stowed him in a dark corner of my parents’ house. His reign ended because at some point, a long time ago, I stopped imagining his reign. I stopped telling stories about his reign. In fact, these sentences are the only written record of his formerly mighty empire.
German toy engineers crafted The General with an intended purpose in mind. They slated this figure as the enemy of a few pirate figures in one boxed set. But the German toy engineers who crafted him could never have imagined that this specific figure would become The General—the most powerful Playmobil ruler of all time, an adroit diplomat, and, for a time, my most treasured possession.
The General is like a piece of writing. Both are subject to temporality and sentimentality. Both are crafted for a purpose but often find another. Both are capable of permeating minds. As The General was a vessel through which my imagination flowed, a piece of writing is a vessel through which the mind of the reader flows. A German engineer can engineer a toy, and a writer can write a book, but neither the toy engineer nor the writer can predetermine what a child or a reader will inject into his or her work.
Now that I am a fledgling adult, I no longer tell stories with Playmobil. I write them down. As a writer, I am constrained—and freed—by the page. Writers cherish paradoxes, but writing as an art form is itself a paradox. It is the most infinite yet the most finite medium. An infinite combination of words can render an idea, but a writer must choose only one combination. To wrangle a thought into words on a page is a melancholy task. Still, in the hands of a reader, a finite piece of writing returns to its infinite nature. One page can conjure an entire world in a reader’s mind. Two readers may conjure two entirely different worlds in their separate minds after reading the same story. Here lies the nadir—and the zenith—of writing as art: Writing can only become art through reading. Reading, then, is itself an art form complementary to writing.
This explains why the best writing is simple. A practiced reader can only find complexity in his or her mind if he or she sees simplicity on the page. All writing must bind the reader in some ways to convey ideas and meaning—with the use of words, sentences, characters, plot, setting, argument, or others. But when a writer allows a reader the freedom to imagine certain aspects of a text, the writer allows the reader to engage in the art of reading. Imagination is the art of reading. The quality of art found in reading a text is equivalent to the quality of art found in the text itself. Good writers employ strong images and metaphors to induce the reader’s use of imagination within certain boundaries, without aiming to tell the reader exactly how he or she should imagine something. Writing should be specific without being too specific—another paradox of writing as art.
Similarly, The General was a great toy because it allowed variegated imagination—it allowed art. The General was a single, specific object, but I could imagine an infinite number of stories about him. When children play Angry Birds on an iPad, they aren’t playing with a great toy. While Angry Birds may be an aesthetically pleasing form of entertainment or distraction, it cannot be art. It is too complex. It entirely inhibits the imagination of players by explicating gameplay and narrative. A child would be better off with a rock and a rubber band.
