For years, people have bought into a lie.
A picture is not worth a thousand words. The person who said that was wrong.
When he was much younger, my older brother claimed that if a picture was worth a thousand words, then a memory was worth a million. But, that, too, is flawed.
Too much worth is placed on the picture. Can you hear a picture? Can you smell it? Taste it?
Right now, I hear these words inside me as I type them. Do I hear them in my head? Or, my heart? Their gentle cadence propels their soundless music. Whose voice do I hear? Is it even hearing if you do not use your ears? Perhaps it is better to say that I feel these words as I type them. Maybe I know them as I type them as I might know to move my arm when I will it.
Our voiceless inner narrators entertain us every day. At least mine does. I hear my “inner monologue” as I shop for groceries, wait in line at the Post Office, or sit on my couch and watch a football game.
A picture cannot capture a moment the way that words can. A picture is two-dimensional, flat, a diversion—a broken mirror, containing only a bit of what was happening during its conception.
Words—these little black specks on this glowing “page”—they can transport, invite, welcome a person into a visceral world alive with senses untouched and unseen that exist only in the deepest core of our beings.
When I was an undergraduate, my father said that the blank page was my canvas. But, I corrected him. My canvas is someone else’s imagination. The words, I said, are the brush strokes.
Indeed, writing and reading are intimate acts. Writer and reader must merge and, in some ways, intertwine each other as my writing voice sings in harmony with your reading voice.
A picture can be worth a thousand hours of contemplation, but a picture is not worth as much as one word. A thousand words are worth so much more than a picture. They are the only things that can come closest to approximating the very weight of our souls.
3 comments:
Sarah Dearest,
I love your words but I will have to disagree. When I read the stories you create I paint a mental image or photo to help me understand. I don't know that the ratio is really a 1,000 to 1 but perhaps it's just because you are an exceptional writer...
What I love most about photos is that they let you pick your own story. Even if it isn't anything at all like the photographer had in mind. Two people can look at the same image and get two different feelings of what is happening... That is a power that only the visual arts can provide.
I often walk around looking at life like a photo. Take what snapshots I want to remember and try to leave the rest behind...
I haven't read the whole of your article,I just went through a part of it.From what I understood you consider words are more important than pictures.Well the understanding of pictures would require words while the opposite doesn't happen,which is in accordance with what I read.But words in turn would have no meaning if they wouldn't correspond to meanings.Pictures are many times rich sources of meanings,richer than words,since one word corresponds to one meaning for a given point of view.Words are just a tool of thought.Pictures are a product of thought,they are not quantitiatively comparable.But pictures are a product of thought and they have an intellectual form so they can be processed by the mind via thought,which uses words.When one is negotiating thoughts the use of many words takes place,which justifies the phrase "One picture equals a thousand thoughts".But this is a rather rationalistic and maybe hasty opinion.
Thank you for both of these comments! I'm not necessarily married to the ideas that I espouse here. But, it was fun to play with these ideas of pictures and words. I do believe that words and pictures are apples and oranges. My biggest issue here is with the notion that a thousand words is equal to a picture. To me, that is a false comparison.
Thanks for taking the time to read my blog!
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