On May 10, 2008, at 6:25 PM, William Conger wrote:
I suspect the fundamental cognition is pictorial. We sense pictures
and then try to clothe them in words...while they act like restless
kids.
But why is some prose noticeably image-free, metaphor- and motif-povre?
Bdcause is that language is far better suited to setting out
propositional discourse, and images are better for efficient
description of appearances; language unrolls events in time, and
images give the immediate correlations between corresponding part;
etc. In other words, one isn't prior to the other, either in time or
importance.
Why do we bother with music and dance if we already have words and
pictures? Because there are some things that words and pictures don't
do very well.
And on this, Freud observed that dreams are visual puns, and puns are
the substrate of humor. I.e., word and image are intimately correlated
in our subconscious and internal processes.
I think it's also worthwhile to bear in mind that both word and image
are very strong, very powerful modes. The opening of John's Gospel
says, "In the beginning was the Word," Logos, which has the power to
bring into being, as was set out in Genesis, "God said, 'Let there
be ..." and it was so. God gave Adam and Eve the authority (=author,
writer, creator of stories) to name the beasts and have dominion over
them. And let's not forget the various versions of iconoclasm, from
the Jewish and Islamic prohibition of graven images (the power of
idols) to the Iconoclastic Controversy in the Christian church, to
various forms of prohibition of images (mostly, these days, sexual
images, and some gruesome and violent images) and words (obscene and
profane in public speech, and nowadays, so-called "hate" speech or
"offensive" speech).
There are some prohibitions and admonitions against dancing, mainly
because of the immediate sexual associations of it, and similar
warnings against music. (Think, Elvis and his hip-swaying, and
earlier, Sacre du Printemps and Njinsky's dancing, and, of course, the
time-honored lures of the Sirens (song) and Pan's pipe (music), whose
role as an enticer has been taken over bt the saxophone (Bill
Clinton's instrument, btw).
Music and dance bypass the kind of thinking that both word and image
participate in--the representational and discursive. Both are
inarticulate in that way.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
