Let’s talk serendipitous juxtaposition; when two elements are brought together unintentionally, to produce another, previously unconsidered and stimulating, whole.
A tourist wandering through an unknown city might take an unscheduled turn down a side street. “Let’s see what’s down here,” they say and off they go, encountering sights they might otherwise have missed, like a plaza full of orange trees or a fountain full of ducks! Who knows? .
An artist making a study of fungi in charcoal might pick up a dry brush and flick the black dust that is embedded in the page until the line is lost in a graduated haze. No longer an organism; the page had turned dark with other possibilities, like thunder, oppression or the promise of rain.
It’s about looseness, about letting go; permitting something to happen without human control. And the writer does this in the process of an edit. How many times have I moved a complete paragraph from one location to another, only to find that a new relationship with the adjoining paragraphs appears between my characters/action/concept; elements juxtaposed that I hadn’t considered before. It is this crazy coinciding that makes you halt in your steps and springs open the latch to an alternative view. How precious is that?
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