Consider this—Peter Schjeldahl on seeing and interpreting

A  critical part of memoir writing is faithful reportage, as accurate as possible re-creation of experience. The other, equally challenging part becomes our interpretation of that experience, our reflections and realizations, the meaning-making that turns our experiences into story. A writer's deftness in handling both the reportage and the reflection distinguishes effective memoir writing--with a goal of representing reality just "economically" enough to keep a reader's attention and, ideally, to create art.  

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, always dependable as an elegant prose stylist and challenging critic, talks (The New Yorker, November 29, 2010) about absorbing visual experience and suggests that our assessment of that visualization is made familiar because of all we've experienced previously and what we want to experience.  We see something we want to see based on what we have known and what we long for.

from the Mary panel, Ghent Altarpiece

Schjeldahl ‘s article, “The Flip Side,” reports and analyzes the history of the location and restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece, begun in 1432 by Hubert van Eyck in Ghent, Belgium:

 I got to study them [the Mary panels] from a nose’s length away. Their sophistication is staggering. The intricacy and sumptuousness of the images are achieved with economical technique. Each of the hundreds of pearls that fringe Mary’s robes is just a dollop of gray hit with a spot of white, so perfectly judged in relative tone that, from any distance, it exudes pearlescence. A seductive softness in the flesh of Mary’s throat owes to one long stroke…. Van Eyck understood that realism doesn't require verisimilitude but only just enough visual cues to exploit the mind’s credulity. We know now, from brain science, that seeing is not a direct register of what meets our eyes but a fast mental construction that squares sensations with memory and desire: what we believe and wish reality to be.

 Perhaps like a viewer studying a work of art in a museum, readers of narrative nonfiction instantly absorb text, making meaning of their own, recognizing their own memories and desires in our stories. If this is so, if art can "exploit the mind's credulity," if a reader's perceptions are also "fast mental constructions" instantly created, it's easy to understand why writing requires such an artful creation process. So, how does Schjeldahl's idea match what you experience when you write your memories, when you compose and structure your writing in an attempt to make meaning of what you've seen and felt? Can you describe the challenge of expressing just enough reality to capture the reader's imagination and to tap into the universality of experience?

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