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I’ve been bringing home magazines from the airport. It seems the instructors, collectively, have subscriptions to just about every flight-related magazine in existence, and for whatever reason (maybe they’re done reading them or just want to pass around an article) they bring them to the airport and place them on the large shelf in the trailer’s restroom. I’ve raided the stacks lately and have amassed a sizable collection of my own.

I can relate to it now. It’s relevant. I look up at the sky and see an MD-80 or a 737 tooling along overhead and think, “The pilot’s doing just what I do,” except scaled up appropriately. But the core skills are the same. Reading the magazines produces a similar reaction in that I have a frame of reference for the jargon, the description of the planes’ responses and the performance numbers like cruising speeds and takeoff distances. I have to say, though, looking longingly up at the sky today, I wanted nothing more than to forget all the numbers and that I knew all of that and just do loops and barrel rolls, spinning the horizon around and around again before diving for the ground, pulling back and zooming upward…

Flying hasn’t been as fun lately, but that’s not a bad thing. A few weeks ago when I was in the midst of my series of solo cross-countries, I was having a grand time. The combination of new, unexplored destinations with less pressure from the instructor to perform maneuvers correctly (since there weren’t any) made for much enjoyment. Now there’s a new sense of focus pervading the training as I ramp up to my Private Pilot checkride in a couple of weeks. Efficiency in the cockpit counts–we try to squeeze as much practice as possible into the time we’re in the air. The result is that little 1.5 hour flights seem much longer than even 2.5 hour XCs, but when on the ground, especially if the flight went well, there’s a sense of accomplishment. It’s productive practice, sort of like working out in the gym–I don’t tangibly feel my muscles getting stronger, but I know they are by the results. Soon, love, soon.

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Is one of the marks of a truly great work of art its ambiguity? Think about it. What’s a major constant between most great works of art? They all speak different concepts through different media–art being a creative realm necessarily means that the channels used for expression are often new ones; the very newness can be a keystone of the artwork’s greatness, its innovation. But I’d make the case that another thing shared by all great works of art, the Mona Lisa, Dante’s Divine Comedy, is that they’ve been rehashed, discussed, speculated about, dissected, analyzed ad infinitum by critics and art lovers and the masses. Oftentimes there are as many disparate takes on a single piece as their are observers. The lack of a common consensus concerning any of a work’s attributes implies a degree of ambiguity. To generalize in that direction, the more potential a work of art has to be talked about, the more successful it is.

Of course it’s all kind of ironic given that one of the main goals, some would say the primary purpose of art is communication of an idea or a concept or an emotion. And if ambiguity is the highest goal, the less overt communication of the artist’s idea the work contains, the better for ambiguity. There’s more for the critics and art lovers to speculate about. So it would seem that two major needs of art–the degree of ambiguity needed to elevate a work of art onto the plateau of greatness, and the artist’s need to achieve a creative release through communication–are at odds.

That said, I hold back from placing ambiguity as the primary target or highest goal of a work of art, because a certain amount of purity of expression is to be admired as well. If a piece communicates just one thing, but does it very well, that can elevate it too even though there’s less to speculate about and hash over. Brancusi’s Bird in Space (flight), the Parthenon (proportion) and David’s Oath of the Horatii (neoclassicism) are some examples. So there can be great works of art with very little ambiguity, ones that are just admired as archetypes, standards of success in expressing their qualities.

What else make a great work of art? I have fondness for ambiguity over simple purity of expression just because I like to think about and admire the art rather than simply admire it. I like the speculation and the fact that I can attach my own explanations to the art, make it mine, as it were, more easily if some things like intent and message are less obvious. But I have a feeling that if we distill the mass of critical and popular reaction to art we can arrive at a few more ideals besides just ambiguity and purity of expression. Or are those the two major factors in tension? I love to systematize things, to take the holistic view, and this is a manifestation of it.