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| The Web of Image |
For several days now, I’ve been trying to pull together my
reflections on our second week of Good Stories. I’ve missed my self-imposed
deadlines for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Now it’s Monday midmorning and I’m
reconciled to this phenomenon: these words are just not going to compose nicely!
In a somewhat perverse manner, that’s the theme. Words and images make for a
dialogue, maybe an unresolved dialectic, in which neither really “gets” the other. It may even be that each is
trying for dominance, or maybe even for separation from each other.
Yet it seems
that this very word/image engagement constellates the very purpose and opportunity
in good work with stories. And results happen mostly with surprise, but it's the kind of
surprise that comes from disciplined labor. If there were an emergent word for
this phenomenon, it might be Creativity—a happening not to be defined, but to
be danced.
In Good Stories, our reach is for the light to come through, the in-sight that
illuminates unique gift or destiny or identity, that sense of alignment with
reason-for-being. That’s the buried treasure.
It’s a treasure buried both inside
and outside, and we need good stories to build the way. Our ancestors knew they
couldn’t write a prescription for getting there, not even for a beloved
grandchild, but they put the best they could into stories. And stories are much
more than words because the good ones conjure images and derive from images, from
the archetypal kind of image that translates into unimagined meanings as time
moves on and as our consciousness and conscience develop.
If we are going
to participate in the dance with good stories, the play between word and image
must be supported. For example, one kind of image-making that I love comes through
photography, especially when a digital image appears on my computer screen more
beautiful than what I’d seen through the lens of the camera. In this way, the
art of Good Stories depends on grace and hard work. The image on my computer
screen results from a gift of nature’s beauty and my chance of seeing it
results in part from dedicated hours of looking, camera in hand. Similarly, our
satisfaction with digital media production builds from attending actively to
good stories, looking for insight and direction with intention of advancing
peace and justice. The point is that connecting the story words with our own
images into a meaning-making production depends on dedicated practice that
attends to the dynamic between word and image.
Our first week
set the foundation with recognizing resonance. That’s the essential starting
point: an unarticulated buzz, a spark of electricity. We paraphrase the hit in
the story in words and make an image to represent it. Going further, we begin
to theorize resonance by translating the universal/archetypal level into
individual/local applications.
For week two, our next priority
emphasized developing technical capacity to represent these “hits” and to
compose them into digital media productions. While this might look like a
simple bridge to cross, there’s a terrible troll hiding in the shadow that
often sabotages the crossing and hoards the treasure. Many textbooks state that
the script should be written before entering the production program. The
implied assumption, the troll, is that one can split the conceptual (the
word-script) from the technical (the image track and other aspects of
production). Instead of following this prescription we should be the flashing
sign: Danger Ahead!
We best proceed with a continuing
awareness that on a special level the conceptual/technical are indivisible. In
his Clark Lectures of 1963, poet-philosopher Louis MacNeice put it strongly:
“I doubt whether one can draw a
clear distinction . . . between a mode of expression and a mode of thought. As
every poet knows, one cannot draw any clear line between form and content. Yet,
as every critic knows, without drawing such a line a criticism is impossible.
So, just as with any other kind of writing, in order to discuss parable writing
at all one has to use what Aristotle would call a ‘bastard reasoning’ and
pretend that form and content can be separated” (Varieties of Parable, p. 5).
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Another way to convey this
struggle involving words and image comes in my personal experience when our
class moved into the second week. Because the experience of story is so crucial
to the design of Good Stories, I fully expected us to be engaging in oral
narrative, even as the demand for attending to the technical was strong. So I
was driving to campus still waiting for the right story to settle in my mind.
As I listened for the fit of a story that would segue effectively from our
first week, the Grimms’ Twelve Brothers
came to mind. I was drawn to the sister’s pronouncement of her identity. When
asked, “Who are you?” she speaks for any of us: “I’m the child of the king and
I’ll search for my brothers until the sun . . .” This story and theme could
extend the seam we’re weaving between authentic character and fate/destiny. It
also carries the divine tone still humming from week one—like Luis’ mantra and
the parrot as spirit-symbol. Yet as I tried to rehearse Twelve Brothers, the flow just wasn’t coming. I scanned in my mind
for another story. Water of Life
similarly ought to fit in but it also didn’t have the feel. Timing wasn’t
right. So what’s going on?
Reluctantly, I stopped trying to
push a story into the day’s plan. I still believed including a story is the
right way to go, especially early in the course. Why isn’t it fitting? Holding
that question, I shifted focus to work on the technical area. I made another
demo, using Adobe Premiere Pro on the Dell computer (instead of the Mac) in
order to get more familiar with equipment that many of the students use and to
have a sample for them to see.
Then in class I elaborated the
process they would use in preparing their productions. I made directions much
more prescriptive than I prefer but that serve for persons without production
experience. As I showed my demo, I noted the way we start by selecting images from
sketches made the first week out of the points of resonance. Then we draft our
voice-over script. I commented on how
this sequence of image before word contrasts with directions given in most
manuals for digital media production. Instead of writing the script first like
the manuals say, I talked about the need for a dialog between image and word.
Later, while
driving home, insight came in about the reason why the technical needed the
full attention of our class session instead of sharing time with a story. I was
thinking that the first production should function primarily to discover the
questions that wanted our focus. What ideas were being opened? For example,
when I watched my draft, I felt that certain segments needed additional images.
For example, at one point the visual flow was not sustaining attention when a
simple image was on-screen too long. Also, a few times something was said that
was not visually reinforced: 1) add a visual for Epaminondas & maybe for
Lazy Jack, 2) add another visual for the Individual Level when I talk about riding
Leg’cy, and 3) add text-on-screen where
a phrase might not be clear, “faith statement” not “bank statement.” What if we
really looked to our technical production for guidance instead of relying so
strongly on another story?
The draft of our production rides
at the edge of the ocean where the unconscious laps up against the shore. When
images arise before words articulate, they potentially bring the “water of
life,” like life-energy that emerges from the oceanic unconscious. But this
potential vitality will rush back if we do not hold it while it shifts shape
the way the Ancient does with Menelaus (Odyssey,
Book 4, lines 487-489). The power of archetypal images in terms of restoring
vitality and meaning to life has been elaborated most fully in psychoanalytic
work that requires considerable experience and study to penetrate, but a few
passages will suggest key themes.
1. The unconscious is the great
source of human creativity.
Both [Nietzsche & Jung]—though neither would have put it
this way—were in the existentialist tradition of belief that without conflict
and suffering, consciousness is doomed to stagnation and regression. Both
sought, instead, for a philosophy and psychology (if they would admit a difference
between the two) whose test is simply but richly this: does it conduce to a
life rich in fulfilment, attainment, even transcendence to a realm of
integration beyond what is reachable from the comfortable couches of
everydayness. Theirs, alike, was a philosophy of darkness, no less than light,
a celebration of the Dionysian spirit wherein is found the scariness of the
unconscious with its alarming dreams which are yet the great source of human
creativity. . . They agreed that no one’s intellectual or artistic achievement
can be understood or fairly assessed without regard for the whole self of the
creator. . . Jung would have rejoiced in Nietzsche’s equating greatness in a
man with his ‘comprehensiveness, and multiplicity, his wholeness in
manifoldness—how much and how many things a person could bear and take upon
himself, how far a person could extend his responsibility.’*. . . Thus [to
Jung], to neglect the profound questions of the origins and destinies of human
consciousness is as self-defeating as neglecting dream and myth. (James L.
Jarrett, “Introduction,” Jung’s Seminar
on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, pp xx-xxi)
2. Images reflect multiplicity.
“Images by their very structure
are multivalent. If the mind makes
use of images to grasp the ultimate reality of things, it is just because
reality manifests itself in contradictory ways and therefore cannot be
expressed in concepts. . . It is therefore the image as such, as a whole bundle
of meanings, that is true, and not
any one of its meanings. . .” .Mircea
Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 15.
3. Archetypal images can be
misused but not lost. “today we are well on the way to an understanding of one
thing of which the nineteenth century had not even a presentiment—that the
symbol, the myth and the image are of the very substance of the spiritual, that
they may become disguised, mutilated or degraded, but are never extirpated. . .
The “origin” of the Images, also, is a problem that is beside the point. . .” Mircea
Eliade, Images and Symbols, pp. 11, 15.
4. When image-making (digital
media production, for example) imitates exemplary models (good stories, for
example) and not arbitrary invention, the treasure is opened of psychological
reality and spiritual truth.
“It depends, as we said, upon
modern man—to ‘reawaken’ the inestimable treasure of images that he bears
within him; and to reawaken the images so as to contemplate them in their
pristine purity and assimilate their message. Popular wisdom has many a time
given expression to the importance of imagination for the very health of the
individual and for the balance and richness of his inner life. . . To ‘have
imagination’ is to enjoy a richness of interior life, an uninterrupted and
spontaneous flow of images. But spontaneity does not mean arbitrary invention.
Etymologically, ‘imagination’ is related to both imago—a representation or imitation—and imitor, to imitate or reproduce. And for once, etymology is in
accord with both psychological realities and spiritual truth. The imagination imitates the exemplary models—the Images—reproduces,
reactualises and repeats them without end. To have imagination is to be able to
see the world in its totality, for the power and the mission of the Images is
to show all that remains refractory
to the concept: hence the disfavor and failure of the man ‘without imagination’;
he is cut off from the deeper reality of life and from his own soul.” Mircea Eliade,
Images and Symbols, pp. 19-20.
This point is also asserted by
Jane Hirshfield in Ten Windows where
she quotes Basho who says, “Do not follow the ancient masters, seek what they
sought” (p. 82).
5. While the unconscious remains rather inaccessible,
the adaptive unconscious as an “informed gut feeling” can be developed for a
guidance system.
In Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (2002, p. 23), Timothy D. Wilson defines the unconscious as the part of the mind that
“I cannot access even when I try. A better working definition of the
unconscious is mental processes that are inaccessible to
consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior..
. [including] the way I select, interpret, and evaluate incoming information
and set goals in motion.” He elaborates:
“The term ‘adaptive unconscious’ is meant to convey that nonconscious thinking
is an evolutionary adaptation. The ability to size up our environments,
disambiguate them, interpret them, and initiate behavior quickly and
nonconsciously confers a survival advantage and thus was selected for. Without
these nonconscious processes, we would have a very difficult time navigating
through the world…” Wilson illustrates with pattern detection studies (e.g.,
Pawel, et.al. using computer screen, 4 quadrants, choosing the one where X
would appear, and learning ‘nonconsciously’ the complex rule but not being able
to tell what it is); interpretation/translator; feeling & emotion to
evaluate; goal setting.
Wilson summarizes the significance of the adaptive
unconscious: “As we have seen what is typically thought of as the “proper work”
of consciousness—goal setting, interpretation, evaluation—can be performed
nonconsciously” (p. 43). Wilson adds guidance on the application of the
adaptive unconscious: “The trick is to gather enough information to develop an
informed gut feeling and then not analyze that feeling too much. . . The point
is that we should not analyze the information in an overly deliberate,
conscious manner, constantly making explicit lists of pluses and minuses. We
should let our adaptive unconscious do the job of forming reliable feelings and
then trust those feelings, even if we cannot explain them entirely” (p. 172).
Our
work/play with digital media production aims at connecting us with this dynamic
between word and image through our engagement with good stories as we draw upon
our resources of creativity and the adaptive unconscious.
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