I used to wonder if there was a way to look at pictures like these and, without knowing time of day or cardinal directions, figure out whether I was seeing a sunrise or a sunset.
It'd be a cool little trick but also help me to contextualize the "true" picture better. This photo of a cloudy, tranquil expanse takes on different meanings depending on whether you see the sun setting or rising, don't you think? Well, turns out if you don't know the time or where you're facing, you can't tell whether you're seeing a sunrise or sunset. Or, if there is a way, I didn't find it.
At first it was a bit of a letdown, but eventually I started to see that kind of open-endedness as a positive. It gives the picture versatility, allowing it to more easily take on different meanings depending on how you feel. It also helps condition you to look at things from multiple angles. You can play with the assumptions with any picture, it's just easily demonstrated when the sun is on the horizon.
I was never really interested in authorial intent. It's an interesting critical exercise to think about what they wanted to convey and the different ways they executed it, but I was always much more interested in what I myself could get out of any given work. The author can never predict all the different thoughts and emotions they're going to evoke. Personal interpretations are not only much more visceral because of the inherent personal connection but also significantly more interesting because they're emergent, unplanned by the work's creator.
On a side note, that's the reason why I don't like
genius.com very much. It's cool to read about what the writer had in mind and it can help explain abstruse lines, but too much of the writing I've seen on that site seems to lead readers to look at authorial intent as the sole legitimate interpretation and implicitly discouraging people from reflecting on what the music means to them.
