#85

Pictures are worth a thousand words; this is an exchange rate little-debated, and I am not going to debate it now. I even think we are perhaps underselling most pictures. Most who dabble primarily in words but use them to write about art (ill-minded folk, difficult to trust) tend to generate about fifty thousand words per picture, creating five corollary picture's worth of interpretation and as though to fence it in and keep it tame, as though such action does not generate tracks that can be followed. Nonsense! You can't fight pictures. We all trade in pictures. And pictures always speak for themselves, and tell the truth about themselves no matter what you say.

Walks, however, are worth approximately, depending on the length and conditions, worth a hundred thousand to ten million pictures. No proper walk could ever really be described in words, just as the best pictures still the very speaking qualities of the mind, so that words come filtering up to one's consciousness as though struggling from great depths into sunlit shallows, one by one, before normal thought engages and grinds back into motion. 

Words are made up of abstract symbols, though, and the symbol is the little object, the tiny sign which casts a shadow over the whole universe. Words stop making sense, pictures fade, but symbols--symbols go on and on and on. 

When the word breaks the surface of the water to sail into the air, the whole world can spin on the power of that moment, can balance on its sharpness. The whole picture, visible all at once, in the smallest sign.


--JL