Emily Dickenson Response:

Snow Flakes, By Emily Dickenson is a story about what an observer sees during a snow storm. This person does not like snow at first, as all she wants to do is put on her slippers and leave town. As this happens, our observer cannot help her individual toes. She notes that the appendages that once had been stowed away are now beginning to fidget. This is on account of the cold as they start shaking. Toe after toe are now, “marshalled for a jig” (Emily Dickenson, Snow Flakes). Emily Dickenson describes the cold through her involuntary body movements.

There is something magical about snow and how it makes people feel, which Dickinson illuminates in her poem. Snow brings memories of joy and happiness. This is because cold, rather snow, is often associated with holidays. Regardless of religion, many gift giving holidays all seem to coincide within the winter months. The coldness of snow represents a pureness that is felt as it creeps throughout the entire body. Life is all of a sudden out of our control and our body dances. Dickenson is taking shivering, which can be viewed in a negative connotation, and is flipping it on its head. She wants to point out how important it is to be optimistic in life. When we are presented with undesirable circumstances, we have two options: we can crawl into a crevice and hide from our problems, or we can seize all our options and turn them into opportunities.

Manifesto Response:

Seeing by Wassily Kandinsky is a manifesto about the meanings behind every color. Kandinsky is known as one of the first abstract painters, and it is clear that his artwork is expressed as a driving force in his way of thinking. Kandinsky pinpoints several color weaknesses. Blue cannot stand alone while brown gets stuck. But to what can blue not stand up for and brown get stuck in? Kandinsky says, “Blue, Blue got up, got up and fell” while “fatbrown got stuck — it seamed for all eternity. It seemed. It seemed” (Wassily Kandinsky, Seeing).  He answers this based on the idea of persistence and dependence. Both colors are trying to accomplish a goal, but cannot. They need the help of one another.

This is when Kandinsky indents his manifesto to include the words, “Wider. Wider” (Wassily Kandinsky, Seeing). By using this technique, not only are we reading that we have to broaden our horizons, but we physically see it on paper. These colors have to think beyond themselves and start to think of the whole spectrum of colors. We need to take “white leap after white leap” (Wassily Kandinsky, Seeing).  These leaps, are leaps of faith on behalf of the distinct colors. Normally we think of white as naked, bleak, and empty. On the contrary, white light contains all the colors of the rainbow and this prism is unleashed when Kandinsky says, “everything begins with a crash” (Wassily Kandinsky, Seeing). The crash reflects all the colors racing out into their magnificent ROY-G-BIV presence in the world. Each color compliments one another and it is that persistence that blue and brown have that allow them to succeed.

My Manifesto:

Dribble, Dribble lost it, turned over the ball.

Shoved, yelled and looked for whistle, but didn’t get the foul.

Shots from every spot beyond the arc.

Threes bricked — could not buy a shot all night.

It seemed. It seemed.

You must shoot with confidence.

Confidence. Confidence.

And you must lock down on D.

And maybe your jumper is not falling yet, but your man isn’t scoring.

Hustle after hustle.

And after this defense even more defense.

And in this defense a steal. A layup, a miss, 0-12 fg for the night…

But you are still the leader of the team and you must see this: Confidence is

Where it is.

That’s where everything begins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

With a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . swish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I decided to base my manifesto off of Wassily Kandinsky’s Seeing. I used the same layout of his manifesto, but changed the theme. His art form is in the lens of painting. My manifesto is about basketball, and the ups and downs one can encounter during a game. There is a certain beauty I see in the flow of a basketball game. I started the manifesto much like Kandinsky’s in that colors are sometimes lacking, so too can one’s gameplay be thwarted in a game. You can be playing terribly, but all that matters is that you maintain your confidence throughout. A strategy I pulled from Kandinsky’s manifesto is his delayed solution. Nothing is going correctly for our player until the end of the game. A pure swish and the end of the game.