In my reports, all slides are slavishly similar. Title at the top. Chart in the middle. Commentary below it. At the very bottom, in size five or six at most, the exact wording of the question. Over and over. Everything is blue, polished, always the same. Report like carbon copies. Manic personalities go crazy, turn red, or yawn instead. Where are the colors, bubbles, pictures, fonts, and diagrams? They were sacrificed in the name of clarity.
We humans have, at least lately—about 150 years—unhealthily fixated on life. We’ve let life off the leash and now it bites and tears. Form is always lifeless and loses badly to life. But life without the support of form can’t stand; it lies down strangely and resembles a jellyfish on dry land. It becomes indigestible. The creeping structure of modern poetry is unreadable. Expressionism spews spontaneous life energy at us until we can’t look. Each of our lives is desperately more uninteresting the more we emphasize that it can’t be generalized. The greatest bore is the social obligation to listen to someone’s dreams.
Raw life energy is indigestible. It needs to bubble through instead, like harmony in jazz’s steady rhythm, or story between slavishly identical slides. The expectation that a page in a report has exactly the same layout as the previous one helps us read numbers and story. The ability to not concentrate on established form allows us to clearly perceive content. And if we don’t tame life energy with form, we have no choice but to be dragged along. By the school of hard knocks.