A lot of the time in this modern world, if we're not good at something, or we don't know how to do it or don't have the time, then we outsource it to someone else.
Maybe you've got someone who helps you tidy your garden, or perhaps someone who cleans your house, or maybe if something breaks in your house, you get someone else to fix it, or maybe you take your car to a garage and don't do your own spark plugs, or maybe if your telephone breaks down, you phone the telephone company.
We delegate a lot of things, and that's important, but there are other things that we somehow think that we shouldn't delegate or we shouldn't pay any attention to that which we delegate.
And so, symbology is one of the ways that artists take things from the real world and try to give us back as a message that we can understand or receive, and a lot of the time, we just can't listen, or we don't listen, or we won't listen.
I'm reminded of The Da Vinci Code, the brilliant book by Dan Brown which was turned into a film with Tom Hanks, which was based on symbology and things that were left in paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and other artists to tell us a tale for the future and for later life.
This is what artists do if you watch them work or talk to them.
It's the stuff that exists in songs (even some songs, which seem like pop claptrap) which have a message which are trying to tell you what it's like to live a better life or how to be a better version of yourself.
Taylor Swift has an extraordinary ability to do this, and Ed Sheeran has a similar sort of ability.
It's why people love live music because once they get the message to hear it live, listening to it reminds them of what they're supposed to do.
It exists in much deeper forms in literature.
It exists in television, and some of the most extraordinary television being produced now exists in movies.
Over the Christmas period, I watched The Fault in Our Stars.
I remember Alison reading that book, and Grace read it, too, but I didn't really want to read another book about a child dying of cancer, which is part of our day-to-day life in our house because of Alison's work, but I was riding a two-hour bike in the shed, and I thought 'Do you know what, I'm gonna watch that and see if it is worth my time'.
It's a beautiful, symbolic bit of work of modern youth culture.
It's that type of movie you always got from the 1980s and 90s, which had a moral to the story, trying to poke you with a stick and tell you to get your head up and appreciate what you have and wonder what will come next.
The soundtrack is also extraordinary, especially for its time. The film is over ten years old, but Ed Sheeran does the title track (a song I've never heard him sing), and Tom Odell is on the soundtrack, too.
The point, though, is that if we can just take a minute, just take a little bit of time and wonder what are they saying? What are they trying to tell us?
I guess it's a little bit like Keith Lemon saying, "What's the message?" and although that is hilarious, ridiculous, and comedic genius, it's probably the answer most of the time.
It's probably why bumper stickers are popular because we all need to be reminded constantly of what's important and to stop being lost in the nonsense.
Blog Post Number - 3686
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