Image I (12.19.21)

I want to begin a series of ruminations about image.  I'll plan for digressions, which is to say, I know they'll happen because I'll try not to resist them or to edit them out.  I want this to be an exploration of one of the most fundamental tools of poetry, for readers perhaps even more than for writers.

Begin by rereading my blog post on 2.20.18, on deep image.  But that won't carry me far to where I think I'm headed, or hope to, because that piece links deep imagery and the surreal, the fabulous.

Step back and start out again from a passage by Proust, in Swann's Way.  The narrator digresses into a meditation on art vs. reality and the role that images play in helping us confuse (or understand) the difference between these two notions.  Impossible, says the narrator, to know the real person but only through one's impressions of another.  So, what we know then is only our sense of the other, not "the other" itself.  I say "only."  I should drop that modifier, really.  

What we know of the world, even and especially what we call the real world, is the image of it formed in our minds.  Our senses may perceive something, but through the process of perception an image is formed in my mind that is more or less different from the one formed in yours, even if we experience the something we perceive at the exact same time and from the exact same perspective.  It's definitely not the same as the thing it is formed of.  This is because experience informs perception informs its product, an image, and your experience is not my experience.

I realize, of course, that image-making isn't as straightforward and mechanical as what I've just described.  How we perceive influences our every experience--the world's ideological echo chambers are proof enough of that--and images, especially symbols, icons and emblems, bend our perceptions toward things like "established wisdom," convention, preconceived ideas and the court of public opinions.  

Proust's narrator, a budding artist, has an insight: the images are real, that is, they are our reality.  They are more real, that is, more meaningful to us, than the things they "stand for" because they are knowable and intimate with us, within us, in ways nothing else can be.

This should be enough to bring me to poetry.  What makes a poem emote and mean are its images.  Every week someone in our Wednesdays@One salon at some point exclaims of a poem that we're discussing, Its images are so real and powerful!  I usually like to pursue this line of inquiry, trying to get the group to dig deeper into the poem's imagery and how it imparts "reality" and the power it possesses over us.  (Power in a poem is meaningless to me unless it's understood as power over the reader's emotions.)

I want my W@1 colleagues to be able to distinguish better between images that arouse the emotions, that pique one's conscience or memory or belief, and images that merely reinforce stereotypes.  And I'll stop here to let that disjoining thought settle in for the next post . . .