theRubicon - Post #1000

Is a picture worth a thousand words? by Geoff Ryan

A slightly stream-of-consciousness musing on word and image on the occasion of the 1,000^th published article on theRubicon.

T

o the Hebrews words acquired a power as close to magic as they were allowed. Their God forbade them the thrill or thrall, depending on your heritage, of images which were associated with idolatry. So God spoke to them from off of mountain tops and out of burning bushes, through the natural world and out of the mouths of summoned prophets. God liked words. He preferred them as his chosen vehicle for revelation. He used words to create the world and intends to use them to end the world and everything in between is word-bound and word-activated.

The Muslims stole this fear of image and carried it with them in their conquering train.

People of the Book ergo People of the Word.

Every religion prays and has its prayers. They speak them and write them down in order to speak them. Incantations and oracles, utterances, liturgy and spells and curses… All breathed into life and afterlife. All come into being through words.

Giving language to something can be considered one of the greatest acts of charity in most any age.

The soundtrack of each former generation is but words-put-to-music in order to help our grandparents and our parents and us and our children and our children’s children make it through the day and the night and in truth, make it through our whole lives.

The Americans recently elected a President due to the power of his words and the world waited with hesitant hope to see if the words of this most wordy of leaders would actually give voice to the voiceless or merely cradle his personal ambition. It is not the question of truth or lies. The lie is expected and forgiven if spoken with an integrity of belief by the speaker, even if the rest of us know that these words of promise will be still-born, swiftly dying of exposure the second they tumble off his lips, baby birds launched from the nest before they are ready to fly. Lies are sometimes the most common words.

Words distinguish us from animals. They both separate us from the mute beast and most easily turn us into these self-same beasts…or worse. We incarnate our desires with words and fondle our dreams with words, launch our dreams and weave our fantasies of love and hate with words. Some of us punctuate an inarticulate life with the words of a suicide note. We come into the world squalling sounds we barely understand ourselves and work hard to form them into words: Dada, Muma, which our parents can understand and so we win their approval and affirmation as real people.

This is the first test, really, the test that kicks off all the rest of the promises and vows, covenants and contracts of words that contain our existence. And when we fall silent, we’re bowered out of life and into whatever eternity we believe in by the words of a sacred oratory and religious songs, returning to infancy once again as we await a parental word of approval and affirmation or condemnation.

Dualities fascinate me. More specifically, it is the co-dependency that is integral to every duality, that intrigues. And co-dependency is not necessarily a bad thing, it just is. Yet to employ the term is to condemn oneself as it is a ruined word, kidnapped by the addicted and battered, social-worked out of neutrality and medicalized into a condition. One word in a lengthening list of word casualties, co-opted by those who work the margins so they can wave them like banners: consonants as causes, adjectives as brands. I long for the days before Kleenex when tissues were tissues and when I could legitimately feel gay when happy.

The Chinese have their Yin and Yang, each half completing the other, wholeness achievable only if they come together, co-join, lean into each other, opposing forces yet mysteriously interconnected and interdependent. Co-dependent: dark and light, female and male, low and high, all and more - are yin yang. They are complementary opposites within a greater whole, a duality necessary to complete the whole yet when together, greater than the sum of the whole they create. 

Everything has yin and yang aspects which constantly interact, a dynamic equilibrium, never existing in absolute stasis. Because they arise together they are always equal and if one disappears, the other must disappear as well, leaving emptiness.

The battle of the sexes is the preferred template to tackle this duality - that eternal imbalance and play of power, subtle and overt: “Be a man”; “Act like a lady”; “A man’s man”; A real woman”.  What is it to be a man and a man’s man? How does one act like a lady, like a real woman? What about women who act like men and men who act like women? What about a twin-spirited Indian, what about the comedian Eddie Izzard who calls himself a-lesbian-trapped-in-a-man’s-body? What about all those gay-lesbian-transsexual-bisexual-cross-dressing whatever the heck else is out there? Well…they do pose a problem for the rest of us.

We know that life is lived mostly through the prism of dualities, they book-end our minutes and hours and days. Most always it is an either, or: light or dark, mild or bold? Do we wake up or stay asleep? Are we happy or sad? Salad or fries? So when you throw a third or a fourth or fifth option into the mix, it screws things up. The safe and simple places in our unsafe and not-so-simple world suddenly become not-so-simple and much-less-safe when we have to consider a myriad of possibilities.

Who has the time? Who wants to bother?  So back to Yin Yang, do they have roles complimentary to each other or in competition with each other? Or does it depend, like most things in life, on time and place and culture and conviction (of a religious nature)?

I’m told that Yin is person-oriented and Yang is principle-oriented, generally understood as in women versus men, the feminine pitted against the masculine. Yin-women, “react to situations of everyday life, are concerned about how people around them are thinking and feeling, pay greater attention to the physical conditions around them, are in touch with their five senses and are more likely to embrace spontaneity”. Yang-men, “tend to be more strongly guided by point-of-principles, focus on the abstract and ideological dimensions of life and train themselves not to pay much attention to the physical dimensions of life, live in a world of abstract concepts and ideas, require the establishment of order and structure to function”. 

It sounds complimentary to me. But if, “…all generalities are wrong, including this one”, (according to Mark Twain) so why is it assumed that women can live more easily without a man than vice versa, when widowers remarry so indecently quickly while widows often don’t remarry at all? If Team Yin thrives on human interaction and if Team Yang is so disinterestedly abstract, why don’t men-without-God all just hire a nanny and a housekeeper and use pornography and mail-order blow up dolls to take care of their abstract ideas and ideological needs and pay what minimal attention they do decide to pay, to the physical dimensions of their lives? There must be something more.

What of the Manicheans with their soul-as-light versus body-as-dark, with their Satan-versus-God in a detente of co-dependency, wrestling each other to an exhausted stalemate while cheered on by a cloud of witnesses?

Darkness crowds our childhood and peoples it with fears, beckons illicitly to us in youth, draws the curtains across the completion of our existence. Light warms and reveals. It brings illumination and embarrassment. It sustains and shames.

Are they dependent upon each other? Would light be light without darkness? Would shadows exist without light? Doesn’t light depend on the dark to define it and doesn’t light need the darkness to illuminate it? A shadow is only created because light strikes the darkness. Is the spasm of a sunrise only breathtaking because of the depth of the preceding night?

Darkness can be a friend. It can cloak and cover a multitude of sins. Everybody is somebody’s secret and that secret is oft times best wrapped in darkness and trusted into the experienced hands of the night.

Light is unforgiving and too often merciless in its glare, spilling into the nooks and crannies of our lives, revealing and exposing and warming to life things which we might prefer remain cold and dead and unmoving.

At the height of their religion the Manicheans had churches stretching from the Roman Empire in the West to as far East as the Orient, before it faded away somewhere in southern China. No way was any Roman Emperor ever going to adopt their idea of faith for his state religion. A co-dependent duality would never do in order to consolidate his fragmented empire. Augustine needed something more than these passive Gnostics could offer, they who believed that knowledge was the key to salvation. Their religion couldn’t effect change in a person’s life, let alone a whole Empire. The balance of power between the dark and light was too balanced, like an idle teeter-totter. Augustine needed something that moved, that was potent enough to handle all the weight and power on one side of the see saw and make it go up and down.

Enter the Russians who would say quite the opposite and yet the very same thing all at the same time. A people of ridiculous contradictions and flaming convictions yet consistently constant and for all purposes as conviction-less as any four year old. Their souls sold into slavery for some form or other of utopianism, yet as cold and clear-eyed about reality as any career criminal. A duality specific to that part of the world.

What hope they possess is the hope of anyone who buys a lottery ticket at a million-to-one odds. Their ethics are not about good and evil, but truth and falsehood, reality and illusion and the right way to live for them lies in a balance of these co-dependencies and not in a series of approved actions. The man who chooses to remain neutral and do nothing is far more the embodiment of evil than the man who decisively acts in It harmful and hateful way.

It’s all about living in recognition of reality, but can we handle this? Truly? Picture Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men”, roaring at the courtroom: “The Truth? You want The Truth? You can’t handle The Truth?” Or Nikita Mikhalkov, the director of ‘Burnt by the Sun’, accepting his Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1995: “I want to say the truth, which I don’t know. And maybe I want to say the truth, the cruel truth. But I’m absolutely sure that the cruel truth without love is a lie.”

And so these same Russians developed a duality of languages in order to handle the co-dependence of the sacred and the profane in their illusory reality. Old Church Slavonic for important things: sacred matters, religion, philosophy, documents of state. The Russian vernacular maintained for lowly matters: personal correspondence, songs, sweet nothings whispered into each other’s ears. 

Language acquired a sanctity, but during the “Time of Troubles” in the 17-century the Catholic Poles invaded and brought in the baggage train of their expansion a Catholic explosion of poetry and literature and fiction and the diglossia of the sacred language started to change. As per historical precedence, victors mostly celebrate their conquests between the legs of the conquered women and between the lines of the vanquished language, giving birth to both bastards and bastardizations.

Peter the Great, spellbound by both European sensibilities (and, of all people - the Dutch) had a literary language created. But to do so he needed to separate Church and State and in 18^th century Russia, that was no easy task. Constantine’s state religion had moved east long before absorbing a darker, brooding hold on power.  So he decreed a new a duality, a co-dependency of a new language, a new secular Yin to challenge the hegemony of the old Yang of the gods, and introduced a civil alphabet lightly based on the Church cant yet reflecting the phonetic of the streets. He made education for the children of the nobility compulsory and in so doing birthed the fabled Russian intelligentsia who rose to rule the house of the Russian mind until the Bolsheviks extinguished their light (Stalin fearing as he did any thoughts other than his own mad fantasies).

The cultural memory had been deposited only in the religious centres and this needed to change. If the Church and its spoken code sealed the sacredness of the Word, so too, by extension if you were a writer, then everything you write is sanctified. The Word, the “Slovo”, becomes a synonym for “tale” and “sermon”. The status of a writer in Western Europe was considerably lower than that of the clergy, but not so in Russia because in that land of mystics and madmen he who writes, has God’s Word. God speaks to him and he speaks for God.

But what if a picture - an image - is worth a thousand words? What do we do then? Does this adage speak to power or efficiency? Is a picture more powerful than the 1000 words it would take to describe what is in the picture? Does it say it better and more clearly? Does it move us more deeply? Or is it merely easier to snap an image and not worry about the grammar and syntax and flow of those 1000 words, and therefore it is simply easier and more efficient?

That the camera never lies, well this too is a lie. Of course it lies, like everything else and everyone else, machines and people alike. Lies are the stock-in-trade of social intercourse, the river on which we all journey. Without our lies, large and small, little would flow on this river. Pretending to forget is probably the most common lie of all.

Either way when put together, words and images by right should total something vastly greater than the sum of their parts. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

There are more ways to forget then there are ways to remember. One can forget willfully, and intentionally, blotting out all memory of a person or place or a happenstance and even aspects of one’s self and experience. One can forget unintentionally by misplacing something in the house or misplacing a person in the memory, like car keys or a wallet or a sibling.

You can forget because you want to and because you need to and because you can’t help it.

When you forget you leave something behind, throw it away, move on without it To forget is to jettison something in some way. But to remember is to carry something with you always and never leave it anywhere you can’t get to it. Or leave it somewhere where someone else can get to it.

This too is a duality, a co-dependency: remembering and forgetting, cleaving and carrying.

Sometimes it is easier to forget. When you carry something with you then you have to do something with that memory, with the person or place. You have to make it a part of your life. It makes you heavier with consequence and responsibility. Forgetting lightens the load, one less thing to worry about, think about, one less person to love, to hate, one less place to fear, one less situation that needs tending to. “I forgot to do something“; “I forgot about that person“; “I forget what day it was”; “I forgot what you thought of me”; “I forgot what you did to me”; “I forgot my promises”; “I forgot all about that”; “I forgot all about them“.

Forgetting is a footpath to becoming lost. And sometimes we need to get lost. Sometimes we need to lose. If indeed all great spiritualities are about letting go. Then is “forgetting” the greatest religion of them all? Surely not. Faith is about remembering - my faith is all about “doing this in remembrance of me“… So maybe the trick is in what one keeps and what one lets go, what ones forgets and what one remembers. Or who.

Huckleberry Finn kept all manner of things in his pockets, all manner, and I feel I should do the same, religiously speaking. Am I not the accumulated sum of all my experiences, of all I have seen and done, of all the choices I have made, and the sins committed, the good deeds performed and the people I have allowed into my life?

And is this not true of TheRubicon on this milestone?

Geoff Ryan

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder of theRubicon and was publisher for three years. He is co-ordinator of the 614 Network and organizes the bi-annual Urban Forum. His interests include writing, politics, coffee and his children. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.   

2 Comments to theRubicon - Post #1000

1. In the vernacular of Hollywood, smokin!

   If a picture speaks a thousand words, how many words does a talking picture speak. At 25 frames, or pictures per second, that number becomes a million before you get to the bottom of the popcorn bag. Many of us spend hours in front of the television sets, and marketing experts estimate that on any given day our brains are bombarded by thousands of images. Is life itself not a moment, a very thin slice that exists between what will be and what was. If that thin slice is only a picosecond (one billionth of a second) and yet it speaks a thousand words – wow.

   As a relative outsider (not an Army boy) I have come to appreciate theRubicon as my tutor of all things Army. It’s a snap shot of Army life from all over the globe. It is a collection of words captured in the picoseconds of Army living, or, its simply Polaroid of Army life. The question I have is how many posts does it take to make a picture that is tangible enough to step into? Can our words prescribe rather than describe?

   Thanks Geoff and Bramwell for starting this forum, and Bruce for keeping it up.

   Wayne R.
Wayne Rumsby on April 13th, 2010

2. And the word became flesh and dwelt amongst us…

   Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path…this beautiful ramble gives a lot of insights I’ll reflect on. For instance, rarely do we acknowledge the amount of time we spend not telling the truth in varied settings.

   If duplicity is ‘the river on which we all journey’, which is extremely hard to dispute, it surely gives us an incentive to get closer to Jesus’ aim of letting yes be yes and no be no. I fear the world would be a duller place if we achieved that state, however, and if Geoff is right then we’d inevitably find more and better concealed ways to fib non-verbally.

   Perhaps the best lesson I gain from this auspicious post is that we are duly called to own the entirety of our lives, the good and the ill.

   Thanks Geoff!

   Barry
Barry Gittins on April 14th, 2010

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