Tom Philips

On page 301 of Tom Phillips' A Humument, Phillips suggests that music and visual images enhance the emotional experience by the choice and placement of words and punctuation. The words chosen educe feelings of loneliness and hopelessness. The word choice gives open access to the emotions that Philips is trying to express in the image. Philips uses solid and distorted colors and patterns. He uses straight lines to detail the solid empty room in order to make it a definite reality. For the red orange silhouette of a person Philips outlines with a wavy line to emphasize on the instability of the person’s state of mind.

The first thing that stands out is the red orange colored distorted image of a person. It stands out because it is a dark solid color in the painted against a pastel purple and yellow wall. The image is one dimensional in a three dimensional room and the character is sitting on a white chair isolated from everything. There is nothing around the chair or in the room and gives a feeling of emptiness or displacement. The person is staring out a window as if they are thinking, waiting, or longing for something and the isolation suggests that the character wants to be alone to figure things out or is depressed. The fact that the person sitting in the chair is a red orange color symbolizes feelings of pain. The character is hurt emotionally and is sitting in the chair. The chair is white and may symbolize a feeling of cleanliness because white is a symbol of purity or sanitation and by sitting in the chair and thinking over emotions the character anticipates on alleviating feelings of pain and hurt. Until the thoughts are lost in the fuzz of the floor and the character is bombarded with feelings of being alone.

The walls are complement colors of yellow and purple and help bring out the brightness in each other and making the room have an uplifting positive feeling but the empty red orange shape of a person contradicts the feelings that the colors of the room try to bring out. The bright colors may represent the opportunities and happiness that is present and around but the character is in a separate world where there is no happiness to be found. The color of the wall and the color of the figure in the chair represent a struggle to get over these sad emotions and be happy. The figure is looking out the window but it is not bright outside it is dark. The sky is midnight blue and the grass is forest green. The word that is placed on top of the dark grass is the word “shriveled”. Grass is a symbol of rebirth and growth. The shriveled grass can be looked at as an image of the death of youth, happiness, wealth, or wellbeing. The dead grass could also be looked at as an end to a road where there is no longer rebirth and new beginnings.

The floor of the room is the only portion of the image that is not a solid color. The floor of the room has a fuzzy texture and is made up of a bunch of words that are scrambled up and is a combination of the colors red, orange, black and brown. These colors are symbolic of the season of autumn which is a season of death because in autumn the trees die out and prepare for the cold loneliness of winter. Also a floor should be something that is stable but since the floor is the only part of the image that is a mixture of distorted colors it symbolizes instability and may also suggest insecurities.
The words are placed in bubbles around the image that are similar to thought bubbles. The words chosen help build ideas about the person in the image. It is almost as if the words have been taken from the characters actual thoughts. The first bubble at the top of the image says “only toge” and it drags into a bubble that says “alone.” It seems as though the thought began to say something about being together but before finishing the word “together” the drag indicates a new thought or a realization of being alone. Things are no longer together for the person in the picture but the person feels alone. The next bubble says “loneliness is the throb of my watch, long shriveled aspiration,” it suggests that the character in the picture grows lonely as he watches for something out the window for so long that his desire for it is getting old. “Shriveled Aspiration” is a dead desire because when something is shriveled it has been too long and started to die. The thing that the person is waiting for can be a lost love or maybe just a purpose to live in life.

The last bubble of text says “I have something left, two things left.” and that indicates that something has been lost which is why the character is so and lonely. “First – my viola the other thing your image I cannot get rid of it.” This furthers the feeling of loneliness and lost of everything in life. It evokes feeling of despair but the words in this bubble gives off the idea that there is two things that this person still has and it is the viola and an image. The viola is a representation of music and the image is a representation of a memory which cannot be forgotten. Music may cure, heal, clean, purify, or be used as a form of expression. Music can also help recall memory, reduce stress, and lessen depression.

In this picture the character feels that after everything is lost all that can be done is to sit around and be hopeless. In this image music is not healing the emptiness that the character feels but making the emotional experience stronger and the memory of the lost more vivid and hard to forget. Therefore the music and the images that are in memory deepen the pain and make the outpour of emotions harder to bear because once something is a memory it can not be erased or forgotten.