Words. Just words.
"A picture is worth a thousand words."
Isn't that an odd thing to say, really?
I mean, I understand the underlying idea.
And what is an image, without context?
Where a picture can show appearance, a thousand words can describe appearance; words let the mental image gradually take shape in the mind's eye, like a mental striptease. A picture forces you to take it all in within a split second, where words force you to sit back and let the writer decide what she shows you, how she shows you, and when she shows you. A picture is porn; words are eroticism.
Where a picture grabs a moment and holds on to it for eternity, a thousand words span years, lifetimes, millenia. Words can go from the dawn of time to the end of civilisation within the blink of an eye. A picture is stuck in time like a rock in sand, where words are free to roam the landscape of your imagination, free as a bird. A picture is a second; words are forever.
Where a picture can show emotions, a thousand words place these emotions in a framework of context. Words have the capability of explaining these emotions, giving the backdrop, glancing at the future, showing at whom they are directed and where they will end up. A picture will can only show crude, directionless emotion, where words can give these emotions a voice, a face, a reason to be. A picture is one syllable; words are a novel.
A picture is finite; words are not.
Cheers
Isn't that an odd thing to say, really?
I mean, I understand the underlying idea.
- A picture reveals appearance to every last detail; a picture is the truth, it's fact, it's undeniable, it doesn't lie. It shows shapes, curves, eyes (oh, the eyes!).
- A picture catches a moment in time, and it offers the possibility to travel back to that moment for all eternity.
- A picture shows emotion, albeit anger, sadness, hatred, joy, perhaps even love. Especially love.
And what is an image, without context?
Where a picture can show appearance, a thousand words can describe appearance; words let the mental image gradually take shape in the mind's eye, like a mental striptease. A picture forces you to take it all in within a split second, where words force you to sit back and let the writer decide what she shows you, how she shows you, and when she shows you. A picture is porn; words are eroticism.
Where a picture grabs a moment and holds on to it for eternity, a thousand words span years, lifetimes, millenia. Words can go from the dawn of time to the end of civilisation within the blink of an eye. A picture is stuck in time like a rock in sand, where words are free to roam the landscape of your imagination, free as a bird. A picture is a second; words are forever.
Where a picture can show emotions, a thousand words place these emotions in a framework of context. Words have the capability of explaining these emotions, giving the backdrop, glancing at the future, showing at whom they are directed and where they will end up. A picture will can only show crude, directionless emotion, where words can give these emotions a voice, a face, a reason to be. A picture is one syllable; words are a novel.
A picture is finite; words are not.
Cheers
14 Comments:
But sometimes,
Words fail you. A picture will not.
I'm sure I've been failed by a picture at some point. But that's not relevant right now. We need some kind of solid proof.
So let's see if a picture is really worth a thousand words.
General academic consensus is that the greatest novel of the 20th century is Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is approximately 267,200 words long. So obviously in order to be worth Ulysses, we need about 268 pictures.
A movie version of Ulysses was made in 1967. The full version ran 140 minutes. Movies are usually projected at 24 frames per second. That means that there are approximately 201,600 pictures in this particular movie version of Ulysses. Thus we have overshot our target considerably.
The movie is highly regarded, but I have never heard of anyone suggesting that it is even close to as worthy as the novel, much less worth approximately 752 times as much as the novel.
Therefore, a picture is not worth a thousand words. If we were to be generous to the movie of Ulysses and say that it captured 3/4 of the book (which is a lot more than most people say), a picture is worth approximately 0.5658682 words.
I hope this clears up any confusion.
Pearce, is you would've said this to my face, I would give you a standing ovation.
Great!
Pearce, stop stealing my thunder, dammit!
No, kidding, great comment - thanks for proving my point.
Cheers
Hmm...well, I disagree with you. My opinion:
A picture is finite only if your capacity to imagine is finite. You can sit back and think about words, ponder them, understand them, but when you're done, you're done. When you've grasped the concept the author wants you to graps, there's nowhere else for you to go, or rather, there's nowhere else that you're meant to go. You might, you might not. You can look at a picture again and again, imagine the story behind it and see all the things the artists wants you to see, but you can see much more if you have the capacity to do so.
It's like when you write an explication of a book or a poem or something. You can only go so far. All you need to prove your point should be provided by the author, and speculation is not a valid form of evidence unless the author gives you the right to do so with clues that can be used as evidence within the bounds of reasonable inference.
A picture is food for your imagination. You can dream of what was happening before or after the scene, what people are saying. You make the picture a million different things. They don't have definite meanings. Words do, and they'll only take you so far.
"You can look at a picture again and again, imagine the story behind it and see all the things the artists wants you to see, but you can see much more if you have the capacity to do so."
If you can do that with an image, then you can most certainly do that with words. Words can be just as ambiguous, even more so, as pictures.
"You can dream of what was happening before or after the scene, what people are saying."
Yes, you can dream, you can imagine, but you will never know the context. An image will always be based on speculation, and will therefore never be a complete story. It's groping in the darkness - but if that's your thing, so be it.
Cheers
You say that words can be just as ambiguous as pictures, but then isn't that simply groping in the dark as well, making them equally telling? It just sounds like a contradiction.
Contradictions are fun. And they suck.
Words can be whatever the reader wants them to be. Pictures cannot; they are what they are.
Cheers
Stories can use all kinds of devices to provide ambiguity etc. Unreliable narrators, for a simple example. Wuthering heights is a great example of this: the story is told by a man who knows nothing of the characters, re-telling an account given to her by a chamber maid, who often relates information that is clearly gossip because there is no way she could have been present, etc.
So the story is filtered through Lockwood's naivity, Nellie's prejudices and jealousy, and all kinds of gossip channels before it reaches the reader.
This is all "food for the imagination" as much as any picture. Wuthering Heights is considered relaively straightforward and easy to read for a piece of classic literature, yet every time I return to it I get new things from it.
Once you start getting into truly experimental narratives - especially metatextual works like Finnegan's Wake or Naked Lunch - things start getting REALLY interesting.
Impressive, Pearce - and I did have Joyce in mind, too.
Cheers
For some reason I seem to be putting a lot more thought & effort into comments on other people's blog than into posts on my own.
The other thing I wanted to say was in relation to Brynn's comment: "When you've grasped the concept the author wants you to graps, there's nowhere else for you to go, or rather, there's nowhere else that you're meant to go."
I like this point, and it seems to make sense in a lot of ways, but it misses something that I think is fundamental in writing.
As someone who writes compulsively, and who knows many fine writers and converses with some of them regularly, I've found that many (if not most or all) writers do not realise what they are saying until after they have said it. Writing is a hugely subconscious act, and no matter how carefully you plan your poem or story, it'll reveal things you thought were safely hidden.
And let's face it - language is imperfect, and people's use of language is always flawed. It's often been said (correctly) that no two people reading the same description will see the same image in their head; this isn't just poetic license, or because the writer didn't express herself clearly enough, it's because language is limited.
I'm gonna stop now, I promise...
By all means, don't.
It's a very good point you make there. Language is almost fluid, it can go in all directions, as long as you let it. The only limit to language, however imperfect, is the edge of your imagination.
As an English major, one sentence, three words, have been thrown in my direction more often than not, but that's the case because it's so very very true:
"Language is alive".
Oh, and one point about this subconscious writing. I don't think all writers do this, only the good ones. Take for instance Stephen King, John Grisham, Dan Brown; I do not think they write on a subconscious level, they are very aware of what they are writing. But if you take, for instance, Jonathan Safran Foer (to name my latest favourite), I do think he does write on a subconscious level. Perhaps several.
Thanks for your thoughts, Pearce, they're highly appreciated.
Cheers
I'm not sure that King writes on a 100% conscious level. For example he's claimed that the infamous "room 217" scene in The Shining scared him because he didn't know where it came from, and he's expressed dismay at the sexism & racism he's found in his own work. He's also said that the end of Cujo turned out completely different from how he wanted to write it - but he was taking a LOT of cocaine at that point.
For a more specific example, Ray Bradbury wrote a novel called Something Wicked This Way Comes, and said that years later on a sleepless night he re-read it and discovered for the first time that it was a tribute to his own father.
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