Stone soup
February 14th 2007 22:22
Eventually, the hobo declares the soup ready, and indeed it tastes wonderful. The villagers beg the hobo to sell the stone, but he declines -- it's too valuable. So he packs up his hobo things and is on his way to the next village.
Says Wikipedia: the story is particularly popular in Portugal; the stone is sometimes a nail or an axe; and there are a number of interpretations, including: (1) cooperation is good; and (2) if you want to scam someone, give them the chance to be part of your "success".
But here's a masturbatory interpretation.
Perhaps art begins with a rock, and only really gets going when the rock's removed or rendered irrelevant -- when, say, you take away whatever was the starting point, whether an image, a snatch of dialogue, a destination you were intending towards... -- or when you transcend personal experience, or drop ego.
The stone can then be used for another soup.
The real is inexhaustible, though the whole point of cooking was to consume it.
***
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The image of the river stones came from this website.
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Comment by Damo
I also love the story of Tiger came,Tager came from Sri Lanka.
Sorry we call it the little boy who cried wolf.
No wolves in Sri Lanka.
I guess I'll take my little stone and go go a stanes throw away.
Comment by katyzzz
Photography Tips
MS Paint Art
I guess the whole idea of scamming is to get everything for free and induce others to provide it.
With respect to art, I'm sorry I shall have great trouble getting rid of my ego, but I'm looking for the stone, so I can remove it and create great art, which, incidentally, was never my intention.
Good fun, I love these little fables.
And they are just the way I like it, short, sharp, sweet and easily understood, and to pre-empt your reply, yes, but is it so easy?
katyzzz
Comment by David
Great story ...
In my experience of non-hobo humans (from a true hobo's perspective? As in, from experience?) ...
Non-hobo human's would neither have the patience nor inclination to even stop and see what the hobo was up to ... let alone ask him a single question ... they'd be too busy and too important ... (in their own minds, anyway) ... They'd cross the street to avoid him (and avoid being contaminated ... *
They certainly wouldn't have the patience (nor make time, nor take time) to hang around and watch stone soup boil, let alone simmer ... and certainly not the charity to go and find ingredients to put freely into the soup ...
They'd probably steal the stone ... tell the bloke to piss off and stop polluting the neighbourhood ... (or ring the police and have him forcibly removed), and then sit at home trying to make stone soup in front of Foxtel ... and wonder why the hell it tasted like stone-flavoured water ... while they tried to register 'Stone Soup Pty Ltd' as a company on the stock exchange ... and had a bit of a whinge about how much money it costs to set up a company ... etc, etc ... ***
David ...
Comment by Brenton
Dr Spin
Tales From The Other Side
Blip Blog
Gadget Museum
I"m a big fan of that.
So if I wear a shirt that says "FAG", it's pointless... but that's the rock in the soup. When people add ideas, complaints, issues, laws and all that, the shirt is pointless but what has come of it, is not.
Right?
Comment by JoshZ
- GK Chesterton.
Hmmmm, wondering if you can eat the soup without being perfect. You know, not casting the first stone and all.....
JZ
Comment by KylieW
Celebrity Obsession
Brenton - I love the way you've summed up Adrian's last point. God I hope that was what you were meaning Adrian....or else I've completely misunderstood. Wouldn't be the first time : )
I love your twist on the tale. I've never thought about it in that light before.
Comment by Uula Limanski
Thinking The World
but in art, if if you take away the stone, aren't you taking away the most important part of the thing? I mean, the message you want to pass, the core?
Like in Tarantino's films, where you have only esthetics and nothing inside..isn't it a lower level of art?
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Just responding to Brenton and Uula's comments...
Right?
Well, that's sort of what I had in mind. I was particularly thinking of writing -- maybe it's not the same for music and for painting. And I was thinking about what's involved in the method of it.
It's not that the FAG t-shirt, the initial intention or inspiration, is pointless, but that sometimes it becomes beside the point. It's no longer essential -- or it's actually damaging -- to the "organic unity" of the artwork.
And yet people have a sort of egoistic, sentimental attachment to that initial inspiration. They're often not prepared to remove the stone.
For instance, you might have been trying to describe something about your mother's death. And it might turn out that you've caught nothing about her death at all, and that the interest of your writing lies in something quite different. But one should be prepared, I'm suggesting, to recognize this fact, and remove the stone of one's mother's death, and leave it to be used another time. Go through and recognize what's diamond and what's dust. Don't warp your creation by trying to make it conform to your initial idea, if that's not the direction it wants to go.
One of the basic conflicts in art (I reckon) is that it's not just about the personal. The form of it -- the aesthetics -- are often independent of the personal, and correct the personal. You dance within the rules, just as a ballerina expresses within a rigid vocabulary of movement. When you're composing blank verse, you have to make things fit into a five-foot metre. When you're writing a story, you have to parse life into a narrative structure. When you use language to begin with, you sacrifice part of the reality of the object.
One practical form that letting go of the stone takes... When people do creative writing, and their process was to write out one draft, then another draft... Well,
often the first and last paragraphs of their first draft suck. This is something to do with people having particular ideas of what beginnings and endings are supposed to look like, and writing according to those dictates.
But it's almost as if they need that scaffolding, at start and end, in order to pull the building into shape, even though the finished building must stand without it.
Like in Tarantino's films, where you have only esthetics and nothing inside..isn't it a lower level of art?
Uula, I don't know whether Tarantino, or anyone, is pure aesthetics. But I guess I basically disagree with your model of what art is or should be. I don't think art should be about a message. Because then its value amounts to glorified rhetoric. You're just dressing up more emotively what could more simply and clearly be said.
So, coming from the critic's point of view, I don't like to reduce art to a theme, or a message. And coming from the artist's point of view, I don't think you should be trying to embellish a theme or a message.
An example. Do you know "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller? About the witch-trials of Salem, with heavy-handed reference to the American McCarthy-era communist witch hunts? -- That sort of thing, to me, is a lower level aesthetic. It's preaching. And, worse still, it doesn't succeed as argument. Apart from the emotional, rhetorical effect, you'd have done better to write an essay.
Comment by Brenton
Dr Spin
Tales From The Other Side
Blip Blog
Gadget Museum
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog