"What People See ..."

Doris Lessing writes in her preface to The Golden Notebook:
"... this novel continues to be, for its author, a most instructive experience. For instance. ... I can get, in one week, three letters about it, from three intelligent, well-informed, concerned people, ... ... one letter is entirely about the sex war, ... the writer (of the letter) has produced pages and pages all about nothing else, for she ... can't see anything else in the book.
The second is about politics, ... and he or she writes many pages about politics, and never mentions any other theme.
...
The third letter, ... is written by a man or a woman who can see nothing in it but the theme of mental illness.
But it is the same book. 
And naturally these incidents bring up again questions of what people see when they read a book, and why one person sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern, and how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture of a book, that is seen so very differently by its readers.
And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it - his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn't anything more to be got out of it.
And when a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author - then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new."

I find this question of 'why one person sees one pattern and nothing at all of another pattern' a fascinating one. I think one answer lies in that what people see in a book and, more applicably to this blog, in a work of art is defined by their own experiences; their own personal story, their past history, colours how they experience and perceive the present. 
Which means that the work of art is 'alive and potent and fructifying'.
And that is what excites me in my work: the object takes on a life and story of its own. The object becomes paramount once I have played my part in the first stage of its coming into existence. First there is the - all important - material, which I 'manipulate' (i.e. work by hand) over a period of time, which gives rise to/begets an object, which then continues its own journey without me, entering into contact with other people and constructing its own story.
I, the sculptor, am not the protagonist in the object's story; the object is.
In a world where objects now litter our lives and our living environments, where they are seemingly merely accumulated for the sake it, an object with importance, with its own significance and story, is a wondrous thing. The only kind I wish to have a part in.

I wrote about this in previous posts: 3/08/2012, 27/11/2012 and 18/10/2012.