May 23, 2025

I cannot remember a time when I was not captivated by words. My mother read bedtime stories to me and my brother, and she once told me, years later, that although we both loved them, I was absolutely insatiable. One of my two earliest memories is of sitting on the floor beside my shelf of children’s books, waiting for my mother to get off the phone so she could read to us. But recently I was struck by the question of whether there is something prior to and, in a way, deeper than words. For children’s books always have pictures, and, when reading to a young child, you always point at the images that correspond to what you are reading: here is the house that the children are walking to, here is the wolf dressed up as grandma. We assume that the pictures are subordinate to the words, that they merely illustrate the story, but I wonder if there is more to it than that. For the images have a separate enchantment, and would have it even if the words were somehow removed. Perhaps, independent of the words that explain them and thus delimit them, the images might manifest a strange and haunting power of their own, a power that might touch us on a level deeper than language.

The followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are “People of the Book,” in a traditional phrase. In different ways, they worship a God who is invisible, of whom no images can be made. To People of the Book, access to God and to the truth is through the word. Their God in fact created all things through the power of his Word. The heathen, in contrast, are idolators, worshippers of idols, visible images of deity. For that reason, a strain of iconoclasm runs through the history of the Biblical religions. Moses descended Mt. Sinai or Horeb with the Law that is the basis of the Covenant of the chosen people. What he brought with him was writing: the tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. But he returned to find that his people had grown impatient with a literate God who took 40 days and nights to produce a text that no doubt most of them could not read anyway, and had succumbed to the temptation to worship a golden calf.

The foundation of Christianity is the Bible, a written text. From the beginning, however, the problem was that most people could not read. Therefore, iconoclastic suspicion gave way to the practical need for teaching. What developed by the high Middle Ages was an extraordinarily rich and complex iconography of Biblical characters, scenes, and symbols. The great Gothic cathedrals were, it is said, the greatest teaching aid ever created, the Bible turned into an architecture bearing an encyclopedic set of images like a tree exploding with blossoms. The Mass, itself a complex of symbolism, was celebrated at its spiritual center where nave and transept met in an X, from which the cathedral vaulted, its Gothic verticality an image of the axis mundi. Ezekiel’s vision was of wheels within wheels: the Gothic cathedral was symbols within symbols, at once a unity and a cornucopia of riches. All I had, growing up in Canton, Ohio, were the paintings, sculptures, and stained glass of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, none of which were by any means masterpieces. But sitting there in boyhood Sunday after Sunday, I felt enveloped in a spiritual world, an experience powerful enough that I can remember the inside of that church after half a century. The congregation could read—but the Mass was still in Latin, as it would have been in the Middle Ages, so that the words acted as incantations summoning a mood but were only explanatory to most people by means of the translations in the missals. The few Catholic churches I have been in recently, for funerals, have eliminated all this in favor of the bare-bones antiseptic austerity of Protestant churches. Contemporary abstract architecture, lots of sunlight, few images, and “accessible” services. The visual impact is gone. It is a kind of postmodernist iconoclasm: there is more imagery in some people’s Christmas decorations.

In college, I took an art history course in which we read Emile Male’s classic work The Gothic Image about the encyclopedic symbolism of the cathedrals, and, because of an inspiring art history professor, Harold Cole, went on to read the works of Erwin Panofsky on medieval and Renaissance iconography. The idea of an encyclopedic complex of images intersected with my first reading of Northrop Frye, who derived a similar notion from William Blake. Frye was Protestant, however—he had no cathedrals in his background. The small-town evangelical Protestantism of his upbringing was basically fundamentalist, distrustful of all the mumbo jumbo and weird pictures that the Catholics went in for. At the heart of a Protestant service was not a ritual based on a myth but a moralizing sermon. Frye broke his way out of that narrowness with the help of Blake: Protestantism’s emphasis on the primacy of the Word did not have to mean iconoclasm. Instead, Blake’s theory of the imagination said that the images were inward, inherent in the words, rather than projected outwards in visible form. The encyclopedic imagery is still there, but available to the inward eye. Blake had no cathedrals, nor did he have the rich patrons of the Renaissance, including the Pope, who hired artists like Michelangelo to decorate their palaces and chapels. What he had was his professional skill as an engraver, and he used it to illuminate his own poetry, which was a poetry dedicated to recreating the images of a Christianity universalized into what he called an Everlasting Gospel, in which “All Religions Are One.”

The inspiration for the present newsletter was a passage in Alberto Manguel’s marvelous book A History of Reading about how the transference of religious imagery from cathedrals to books actually preceded the Reformation. In the 14^th century, “several illuminators and woodblock engravers began to depict the echoing images on parchment and paper”:

By the end of the fourteenth century these books of images had become hugely popular, and they were to remain so throughout the Middle Ages, in all their various guises: volumes of full-page drawings, meticulous miniatures, hand-tinted woodblock prints and finally, in the fifteenth century, printed tomes. The first such volume we possess dates from 1462. In time, these extraordinary books came to be known as Bibliae Pauperum, or Bibles of the Poor. (101)

Right at that time, in 1461, the famous poet Villon published a collection called his Testament that contained a prayer to the Virgin that Villon claimed was at his mother’s request, in which his mother speaks:

I am a woman poor and aged,
I know nothing at all; letters I never read;
At my parish monastery I saw
A painted Paradise with harps and lutes,
And also Hell wherein the damned are boiled:
One gave me fright; the other, joyfulness. (105)

In the cathedrals, people “saw in those images myriad stories or a single, never-ending story. There is no reason to think that it was otherwise with the Biblia Pauperum” (107). Manguel does cite the opposing view, however, quoting a German scholar who insists that the Biblia Pauperum was “absolutely unintelligible to illiterate people” (107). The scholar’s opinion was that the images served as a crib for poorly educated clerics. It was actually that skeptical passage that got me thinking. Suddenly, the question leaped out of nowhere: what did the illiterate people see when they looked at those pictures? Villon’s mother clearly knew the general concepts of heaven, hell, and last judgment. But what if she had not? What if she were a low-information Christian, so to speak? In other words, what is the impact of mythological images disconnected from any guiding explanation? To say they are teaching aids, an archetypal PowerPoint presentation, points only to a practical use made of them by a conscious critical mind. But those images were not made up by any conscious mind. They are revelations, either from on high or from down below, depending on one’s point of view.

Eventually, the idea of a Bible of the poor developed towards more educated adaptations. I encountered one of them in elementary school, when I found in the school library a book of Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts. The series that gripped me was the 15 woodcuts of the Apocalypse that Dürer published in 1498. I was probably around 11 or 12, and certainly knew the common Bible stories through children’s retellings—yes, with lots of illustrations. But I’m sure I knew nothing of the Book of Revelation, and it would be interesting to know how that book managed to get into the Harter Elementary School library. Those woodcuts would have been strange and disturbing to a child in any case, but the fact that I had no idea what they were representing made them seem like a glimpse of an alien, incomprehensible dimension of being. Not long after, I also discovered Gustave Doré’s engravings of Dante’s Inferno, which had a similar effect. I had a feeling of violating a taboo, of seeing something that was somehow forbidden to be seen, of a kind of Faustian knowledge of the “absolutely Other.”

And yet I was drawn to it, perhaps in part because I felt I was seeing something I was not supposed to be looking upon, in a kind of imaginative voyeurism. The right-wing censors attack school libraries, seeking to rid them of books that are “grooming” children. Those books somehow, inexplicably, came across my path. They helped to groom me, all right, but not in the way of hysterical cultists’ paranoid imaginings. They groomed me for a hidden imaginative world that lies behind, beneath, inside, long-before—choose your metaphorical preposition—the so-called real world. In the 1970’s, there was an attack on fairy tales, partly for their sexism, but also because the original tales are so weird, dark, and alien. Yes, let’s criticize the role modeling that teaches young girls that their life task is to seduce and marry Prince Charming. But never mind that. What of a bedtime story in which teaches that a wolf may eat your grandmother, but not to worry because we’ll cut the wolf’s belly open and release her again? A story in which a wicked stepmother demands a little girl’s heart from a woodman as proof that he had followed her orders and killed her? In which a girl is taken in by dwarves, not the human kind but the mythological kind that dwell under the earth? Disney dealt with the weirdness by covering it over with cuteness. Later, there was a push to replace the old, weird stuff with contemporary realistic stories.

Too late for me. I was already groomed, kidnapped as if by the fairies into what as a scholar I came to call the Otherworld. In grade school, my reading life was already dominated by the weird, alien worlds of science fiction and fantasy, and I looked upon Dürer and Dante as more of the same. The plots in science fiction and fantasy are often mere vehicles, means to an end. That end is a mood that fans call the “sense of wonder.” Science fiction and fantasy are modern forms of the ancient genre of romance. Shakespeare’s last four plays are romances, and the word “wonder” sounds all through them, along with what is treated as a synonym, the word “strange.”

The strangeness is often powerfully visual. I have kept from childhood my View-Master. The View-Master was a toy made of plastic and looked somewhat like a pair of binoculars. You inserted into a slot a cardboard disk embedded with a series of stereoscopic 3-D photographic images in color. The one disk I had told a story about Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, whose books I had also read. There was a booklet giving the plot, such as it was, but I ignored it after a first reading. The images were of little artificial figures on Mars, then on an asteroid, but it was the quality of the images that made them powerful. It is hard to describe their uncanny effect, for they were not like ordinary illustrations. At that time, most family photos were still in black and white. These were not only color, but 3-D, and the little figurines were sharply backlit. The effect was as close as I will ever come to psychedelics, I suppose. Perhaps it seems ridiculous to attribute such a powerful experience to a cheap plastic toy, but it was the imagination that turned commercially generated images into visions, as it magically transforms all toys in the act of playing. The same is true of the magicians and fortune tellers who are not just frauds. They look into their crystal and actually see things in its depths.

I am astounded to find that View-Masters are still being manufactured, which makes me curious whether I am not the only one who finds this simple technology able to offer a window into strangeness. And perhaps other people, People of the Book, like me, also find their ways back to the world that exists before words. Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading, is now in the process of creating a center for the study of reading in Lisbon, Portugal. Reading is his driving passion—yet he has also carved a set of puppets of the characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy. My newsletter on those puppets (November 18, 2022) got one of the highest viewing stats in the history of the newsletter.

There is an intriguing disconnection here with the science of linguistics. Linguistics has always been primarily concerned with orality, and only secondarily with the visible language we call writing. There is good reason for this. Writing is an invention, one that most civilizations historically have not contrived. Whereas it may be more accurate to say that speech was not invented but evolved. It is not extraneous to us like a tool but emerges from the body, and ultimately from our neurological makeup. We have known since the 19^th century that there are language centers in the brain, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, and they process speech, not writing. Noam Chomsky’s view that we are most likely to be neurologically hard-wired to acquire spoken language is, if not the consensus, at least widely entertained. Chomsky’s evidence is circumstantial: the ease with which all children learn spoken language, almost entirely on their own, by the age of 3 to 5, is arguably impossible to account for without postulating some kind of inherent “universal grammar,” a set of deep structures from which the structures of actual languages are derived.

Post-structuralist radical theorists, especially the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, attacked the “privileging” of speech and what they saw as the repression of “writing.” Much of the debate seems muddled, but some of it seems to have been a modern version of the old quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. Socrates’ opponents were the Sophists, who taught up-and-coming young men how to use language persuasively in oratory and the like. Philosophers also use language, but subordinate it to “dialectic,” in other words to a rigorous logic in pursuit of truth. Socrates was still an oral teacher, but the disinterested pursuit of truth was and still is associated with writing. It is orality, on the other hand, that joins up with imagery to sway people, to collectivize them and turn them into herd animals. Electronic mass communications have greatly increased the power, and therefore the danger, of this method of psychological manipulation. Hitler’s speeches drove people into a frenzy, like Trump’s MAGA speeches. The corrupting power of television, not just through advertising but through its capacity to turn political contests into bread and circuses, was attacked in books such as Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Now, television has given way to the Internet and social media. When voters get their views through either TikTok or Fox News, do we wonder why Trump has become dictator of America?

Deconstructionists associate writing with “difference” and difference with the discriminating power of philosophy itself. The kind of analytical and relational language necessary to philosophy probably depends for its full development on writing—the massive, abstract complexity of the Critique of Pure Reason or The Phenomenology of the Spirit is surely inconceivable without the aid of a written text. Even non-philosophical writing is in one sense abstract—there are no pictures, just marks on a page. Some children, and in fact some young adults, resist reading after the bedtime-story stage because books for older readers have no pictures. There are images latent in those words, at least in creative writing, but they have to be summoned up by the inward eye, which takes an active response. Reading may seem an effortless pleasure to those of us who have become fluent at it, but beginners are confronted with a series of symbols or characters that have to be translated into phonemes that then must be construed into words and syntax, and a story conjured up out of the words and sentences, visualized in the mind’s eye. We could say that writing is a kind of reduction into abstract symbolization for the sake of a certain efficiency. A text is like a zip file that has to be opened. Which is not just a would-be clever analogy: the first examples of writing that we have are marks on the outside of sealed clay containers designating the contents.

But if post-structuralists, or for that matter linguists, wanted to give writing equal status to speech, making speech and writing what Blake called Contraries, we might speculate about writing’s relationship to ancient visual art. We do not really know how writing began, and it may have been invented more than once. But the most basic form of writing is pictographic. In the beginning, before the word, was the image. My curiosity about what went on in the heads of illiterate medieval people when they looked at Biblical images without benefit of a text could be carried further. The first art of the human race was the magnificent paintings of animals in the Paleolithic caves of southern France and northern Spain. We do not know what drove ancient artists to create those images, but it must have been something powerfully important. These are not mere decorations. The caves are secluded and difficult of access. The spires of the Gothic cathedral quest upward: the caves represent a quest downward, the two directions of the axis mundi. Standing in one of those caves, we would see, looming out of what was originally torchlight, images that are like a language we do not know how to read. But not a language of words. Here, words are superfluous, words are not the point, would only distract us from the impact of those incredibly vital, vivid images. Even their reproduction in a book retains something of their impact. Rilke went through a period where, influenced by his association with the sculptor Rodin, he wanted to create poems with something of that kind of impact, most memorably the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which the torso, even though it lacks a head, looks back at the viewer: “here there is no place / that does not see you.”

My original undergraduate enthusiasm for medieval and Renaissance iconography found a Classical complement in the art of Minoan Crete, the Bronze Age civilization that gave us the image of the labyrinth. On the walls of the palace at Knossos were again pictures whose meaning we only guess at, including dancers leaping over the horns of bulls. Minoan Crete was the last of the so-called “goddess cultures,” and among its remains are a series of impression seals that presumably functioned as a kind of writing: impressed into clay or wax, they signified some kind of identification. These seals repeat the iconography of what is apparently a Goddess religion, and they are hauntingly beautiful. Additionally, in the Goddess cultures elsewhere in southeastern Europe have been found hundreds of figurines, almost all of them female, with symbolic markings on the figurines. Archeologist Marija Gimbutas spent a lifetime trying to learn to “read” something of the significance of these remains, summarizing her conclusions in a book for the general public called The Language of the Goddess (1989). It is not that such iconography is “true writing,” of which Minoan Crete actually had two forms, Linear A and Linear B. There is a leap from iconography to writing, but it is apparently one that involves the reduction of what were originally images to abstract “characters” of a script. Early scripts show traces of their pictographic origins, the famous example being of course Egyptian hieroglyphics. Before the Rosetta Stone, it was assumed that Egyptian hieroglyphics were pictographic. They are actually a complicated mix of phonetic, syllabic, and logographic elements, but some of the characters are definitely pictures that have been assigned the new task of representing sounds.

There is something intriguing to many people about a writing system whose characters seem to retain something of their original character as images, the Chinese script being another famous example. I think there is a feeling that such scripts have not “fallen” into abstraction as much as other scripts, which gives them something of a magical aura. We are not talking scientific ideas here, but such notions point to something about our relationship to language that has its own profundity. To the imagination, the letters and numbers of our writing system are not abstract “signifiers.” They are sometimes “characters” in a punning sense. I have at least one friend who told me that, if I remember correctly, she learned her numbers by imagining them as various beings. Sesame Street teaches children their letters by bringing them alive in any number of ways. Nor is this just a kid’s game. Rimbaud tells us, in his famous sonnet on the vowels, that the vowels have various colors: “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue.” But he does not stop there. From each color of his rainbow spectrum emanates an array of images, in a kind of technicolor Creation myth: from E emanate “whiteness of vapors and tents, / Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, quivering of flowers” (Wallace Fowlie translation). By ending with “O, the Omega,” he reminds us that God is the Word, the Alpha and the Omega. Not an abstract word, but a word that became incarnate, what Dylan Thomas called a “walking word.” Moreover, God is a living Spirit who dwells within the dead “letter” and brings it to life.

There is a myth lurking here, the myth of an “unfallen” language in which signifier and signified are one, consubstantial. Common language has “fallen” from this condition into a split, a division in which signifiers are alienated from their signifieds, chasing after a meaning that they can never quite catch. Poetry, from this point of view, attempts to redeem language as far as possible, recovering something of that original condition. You will not find any of this in a linguistics textbook, and in most books of literary theory you will find it treated as a post-Romantic illusion. But, as Blake said, if a fool persists in his folly, he might become wise. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye borrowed three terms from Aristotle’s Poetics, making his own use of them. Lexis, he said, the verbal aspect of language, exists between melos and opsis, meaning that words have something that relates them to music on the one hand and to painting and sculpture on the other. Verbal opsis is evident in the pictographic origins of writing, even if linguists are most interested in “true writing,” defined as one in which the characters of a script stand for the phonemes of the language, in which anything pictorial left in the characters is vestigial.

But opsis does not disappear when writing becomes phonetic. Instead, the pictorial aspect becomes internal, presented to the mind’s eye rather than the physical eye. This is especially true of poetry, which is supposed to consist of “imagery.” When you teach poetry to beginners, you find yourself confronted with questions about which literary criticism is frustratingly evasive. Starting with, well, there are a lot of poems that don’t have “imagery,” and what’s with that? In a class, I begin where literary Modernism did in the early 20^th century. Modernist poetry was born out of the movement called Imagism. Probably the most famous Imagist poem is Ezra Pound’s “In a Station at the Métro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.

That’s the whole poem. I ask the students how they would describe the scene without using the image of petals on a wet black bough, to get them to realize that it is impossible. The image somehow gives us a more vivid depiction of the scene than any literal or descriptive language could manage. Not only that, but it transforms a crowd in a subway station from something dull and quotidian to something inexplicably beautiful. This leads towards the lesson for creative writers: don’t talk; show.

The word “imagination” implies a faculty that works through images, images that do not merely describe but transfigure. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s term for this power in his book on metaphor is “redescription.” The images and metaphors of poetry do not merely describe but redescribe, and that is why William Carlos Williams, in another famous Imagist-style poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” says that so much depends on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside white chickens. However, Modernism’s embrace of the image was ambivalent. Imagism was a reaction against the long-winded reflective poetry of the Victorians, but the idea of the transformative image was really a kind of covert return to the Romantic theory of the imagination, and Modernism defined itself as an ironic and skeptical reaction against Romanticism. The backlash sometimes took the form of a deliberately prosaic talkiness more pedestrian than the Victorians ever dreamed of. How far can we go in making poetry out of the totally nonpoetic, because we don’t any longer believe in magical transformations? T.S. Eliot, in his later poetry and also in his verse dramas, counterpoints “poetic” writing with a flat style that deliberately deflates the “poetic” pretensions. In “East Coker,” after one such passage, the speaker comments:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.

W.H. Auden pushes this consciously anti-poetic style about as far as it will go:

Spring with its thrusting leaves and jargling birds is here again
to remind me again of the first real Event, the first
genuine Accident, of that Once when, once a tiny
corner of the cosmos had turned indulgent enough
to give it a sporting chance, some Original Substance,
immortal and self-sufficient, knowing only the blind
collision experience, had the sheer audacity
to become irritable, a Self requiring a World,
a Not-Self outside Itself from which to renew Itself,
with a new freedom, to grow, a new necessity, death.

That all means something, but I suggest you do not try it out on an Introduction to Literature class. It is all tell and no show. Heaven forbid we should fall into some “poetic” blather about the coming of spring, so instead we fall back on witty philosophical generalizing that is not, really, all that witty. If all of Auden were like this, he would not be the great poet that he elsewhere is. But then, some people like the sound of that interminable voice that never shuts up. To me, most of John Ashbery sounds like the voice in your head that keeps you awake during insomniac nights, but I suspect Ashbery is popular because he makes that babbling monologue into something warmly human, even if all too human.

Instead of Auden’s long-windedness, you might teach Blake’s “The Sick Rose” as an example of how one image has the power to condense a wealth of meaning, some of it below the level of discursive analysis:

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

I have just talked about this poem in the Expanding Eyes podcast. A rose is being eaten from within by some kind of winged worm, but it does not take Freud to see the sexual symbolism of phallic worm and female Rose, the capitalization suggesting a woman’s name. A male predator—but the disturbing thing is that preying on roses is not malicious but rather just what worms do, part of the order of nature. Blake is implying that human sexuality is trapped in a predatory Darwinian fallen nature, and needs not to resign itself but to free itself through the imagination, although that latter moral takes us beyond the poem itself into Blake’s later work. But it’s all there, in eight dark lines. And the poem is illuminated by Blake in a way that brings out some of the image’s implications: a female figure is trying to escape from the rose as from a trap, and human beings are shown in the despairing postures of captives. It can all be “read” at a glance. That is the great power of the visual image, the power to synthesize multiple details into a simultaneous gestalt, a whole that is indeed whole and not just the sum of its parts. Music moves in time, and therefore is linear and sequential, one note or beat at a time, but opsis implies a holistic grasp, a unity. Facial recognition is always of a gestalt: we do not perceive, two eyes, nose, mouth, and then recognize “face.” We recognize “face” at once, and not just any face but an individual face, with hundreds of unique details of both shape and emotional expression.

Blake is uniquely valuable in an exploration of the relation of words and images because he was both poet and visual artist, and, even more importantly, one whose career can be seen as a quest to swim upstream, as it were, to retrace the path by which writing developed away from the pictorial through abstraction back to an origin in which word and image unite. Blake completed his two “brief epics,” Milton and Jerusalem when he still had 20 years of creative life ahead of him. After that, he shifted towards recreating other works, but in a way that united word and image in a new way, culminating in his Illustrations of the Book of Job, a set of 22 watercolor engravings in which the images are primary, with strands of text interwoven around and through them. In the last chapter of Fearful Symmetry, Frye describes what Blake seems to have been aiming for in his later career:

After Jerusalem we can see in his work a development toward the pictograph, and in the Job engravings we are getting down to the very bedrock of imaginative communication, a series of images which are at once pictures and hieroglyphs, rather like what the characters of Chinese must originally have been, in which the common basis of writing and drawing, that is of poetry and painting, has been re-established. (417)

At the same time, Blake is aiming for something else, an order of images not just corresponding to but consubstantial with what Frye famously called the “order of words”:

Blake’s pictographs are to be interpreted in terms of their sequential relationship to one another, as a progression of signs which, like the alphabet, spell out not a word but the units of all words....Blake also seems to be striving for an “alphabet of forms,” a Tarot pack of pictorial visions which box the entire compass of the imagination in an orderly sequence. The alphabet itself, if we may do some illustrative guessing, may be a fossil of some such work of art, the Zodiacal signs another, and the Tarot pack (with which the Job series has been associated) a third. The Vision of the Book of Job has twenty-two plates, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, just as the Homeric epic, according to its Alexandrian editors, has a book for every letter in the Greek alphabet. (417)

Such musings may suggest a way of regarding astrology and the Tarot deck as something better than forms of superstition whose continued popularity are a sign of the irrationalism of a decadent modern world. If that is all they are, then why are the Tarot cards, especially the 22 (that number again) pictorial cards called the Major Arcana, thematic devices in some of the most sophisticated literary texts of our time, including T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels (1981) and Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction epic Nova (1968)? In addition, contemporary artists have been inspired to create their own Tarot decks, reimagining the traditional images according to their personal visions. This includes the just-launched project of my former student Molly Chidsey of Lady Fern Graphics, a "Tarot for these times", as she calls it. She herself has used the Tarot as a form of meditation, one that depends on that word of Jung’s that I use jokingly but seriously, synchronicity, what Jung called an “acausal” form of connection that does not replace causality but supplements it. Both Jung and Frye also became interested in the I Ching, the book of divination whose 64 hexagrams also go back to an original pictographic stage.

A predecessor of Blake’s illuminated poems was the emblem books of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, curious productions which nevertheless were an influence on some major poets. An emblem consisted of an image, usually Biblical or mythological, a motto, and an explanatory text. A typical example is a picture of Cupid taming a lion with the motto “Love Conquers All.” But again the suggestiveness of the emblem lies in the independence of the visual image. Without the motto, in the example I saw online, what you see is a winged person astride a lion, riding it as a cowboy rides a bucking bronco. Maybe you could guess the winged figure is Cupid, but other emblems are more riddling—they are indeed visual riddles. Spenser’s poetry is powerfully emblematic: The Faerie Queene could be described as a poem in which a series of emblems substitutes for plot. There are any number of tour de force set pieces, like the marriage of the Thames and the Medway and the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, but all the action is emblematic—and in this sense resembles the modern genre that Will Eisner called “sequential art,” the union of words and pictures in a narrative form comprising comic strips, comic books, and the graphic novel, a form that Eisner invented. Comics are supposed to be for kids and for the “immature,” meaning those of us adults who refuse to stop being kids. They return us to the concrete, non-abstractive world of the childhood imagination, and thus link up with the illustrated bedtime story.

And the bedtime story, that sleep aid, is the gateway to where all the images begin, the realm of dream. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious, and he felt that dreams could be interpreted, could be “read,” as if their imagery were a kind of language. The Freudian revisionist Jacques Lacan said that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” but his model for that language was the signifiers of structuralist linguistics. That moves away, however, from the actual experience of dreams, which are primarily a series of pictures. I have some skill at interpreting the images of literary texts. But my dreams confront me with another version of the experience I have been speaking of: they are a series of images that are suggestive, enticing, promising a meaning—but the explanatory motto has been clipped off. They speak another language, one that I do not know. It is like attempting to understand an Other who speaks not just a foreign language but an alien one, as in the fine science fiction film Arrival (2016), in which human beings have to learn to communicate with aliens by a pictorial language.

I have just finished rereading Aurélia by the French poet Gérard de Nerval, an autobiographical account of Nerval’s repeated descent into psychosis. Its opening talks about dreams:

Dream is a second life. I have never been able to cross through those gates of ivory or horn which separate us from the invisible world without a sense of dread....Little by little, the dim cavern is suffused with light and, emerging from its shadowy depths, the pale figures who dwell in limbo come into view, solemn and still. Then the tableau takes on shape, a new clarity illuminates these bizarre apparitions and sets them in motion—the spirit world opens for us. (120)

Nerval’s descent into the underworld of the unconscious began with an emblematic image:

One evening, around midnight, as I was making my way back to my lodgings, I raised my eyes by chance and noticed a house number lit up by a street lamp. It was the same number as my age. Then, lowering my eyes, I saw before me a woman with hollow eyes and a pallid face whose features seemed to be those of Aurélia. I said to myself: this must be an omen of her death or mine! (123)

Nerval was 33, the age at which Jesus underwent his experience of death and descent into hell. Aurélia is the name Nerval gives to the woman he loves, who does indeed later die, so that Nerval also likens himself to Dante, who descended into hell seeking Beatrice after her death. That night, Nerval dreamed he was wandering in a labyrinth of corridors and open central galleries. As he crossed one of the galleries, he says,

I was struck by a strange scene. A creature of disproportionate size—man or women, I do not know—was fluttering about with great difficulty overhead and seemed to be floundering in the thick clouds. In the end, out of breath and energy, it plummeted into the center of the dark courtyard, snagging and bruising its wings on the roofs and balustrades as it fell. I was able to get a brief look at it. It was tinged with rosy hues and its wings shimmered with countless changing reflections. Draped in a long robe falling in classical folds, it resembled the Angel of Melancholy by Albrecht Dürer. I could not stifle my shrieks of terror, which woke me with a start. (124)

I recommend the version of Aurélia in the volume On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C.G. Jung’s Lecture on Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Aurélia,’ which includes Jung’s lecture, Nerval’s text, and a helpful essay by Craig E. Stephenson. It also includes the original illustrations for the book by the Symbolist and Expressionist artist Albert Kubin, who gives us his rendition of the fallen “angel.” But in a sense Nerval provided his own illustration, Dürer’s famous etching Melencolia I, which, like his woodcuts of the Apocalypse, seems almost as if it could be an image out of the Tarot. However, labeling that creature with the concept “melancholy,” thus reducing it to an allegory, is all wrong. To me, that image of a gigantic being fallen, trapped and damaged in this lower world, has tremendous power precisely because it is unexplained. And inexplicable—we never meet it again and never get a further explanation of it. Jung was especially interested in Aurélia because of its resemblance to his own Red Book, in which he recorded verbal descriptions of a series of visions he experienced over several years, illustrating them with his considerable artistic talent. Some of them are as strange and alien as anything in Nerval, the difference being that Jung not only retained his sanity but created out of his experiences the vocabulary of archetypal images that are the foundation of his analytical psychology. The fantasist John Crowley points to another example: “a little book published in 1934 by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst called Une Semaine de Bonté. It was made entirely of collaged illustrations cut out of old books...and the resulting dream-scenes, seeming to propose a narrative that’s actually impossible to discover, are wonderfully mysterious and compelling. You certainly don’t need to know that Ernst may have plotted the whole thing according to the principles of ancient alchemy and alchemical practice. In fact, to me at least, knowing that it has such a unifying subtext makes it somehow less interesting, not more” (15-16).

All our dreams are strange. Yet some of us find ourselves drawn towards the strangeness. Why? Because the strangeness hints at transformation, at metamorphosis. Ariel’s famous song from Shakespeare’s Tempest is not a dream, yet it occurs in a play set on an island surrounded by the sea, image of the unconscious, an island ruled by a magician who tells us that we are such things as dreams are made on:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

The strange is a version of what the Romantics called the sublime, which they contrasted with the beautiful. But the sublime and the beautiful, being Contraries, easily undergo what Jung called enantiodromia, the transformation of an opposite into its Contrary.

I have always loved painting, drawing, and sculpture because of their silence, which calms me and gives me peace. The quiet of an art museum is to me like the quiet of a cathedral. I have a head full of words, which is a gift, but one’s gift is always the other side of one’s problem. Northrop Frye knew this too. He sometimes referred impatiently to his incessant internal verbalizing in terms of the Zen description of the mind as a drunken monkey. Heidegger spoke of an Augenblick, a moment of insight; James Joyce spoke of epiphanies. Paul said (I Corinthians 15:32) that in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall be changed. At that moment, the drunken monkeys are pacified, and the mind is calmed as Jesus calmed the sea. And out of that sea may come strangeness, yet also beauty, Venus rising naked on her shell. The moment one’s lover stands naked is wordless. Yes, it is a moment of beauty revealed, but if you think about it, it is also a moment of strangeness, the revelation of what is secret and never seen, forbidden to be seen. There is an element of fear, even of danger. You will be rapt in the stillness of that moment for the rest of your life, no matter what happens in the moment after.

References

Auden, W.H. “Unpredictable But Providential.” In W.H. Auden: Collected Poems. Edited by Edward Mendelson. Random House, 1976.

Crowley, John. The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days. Small Beer Press, 2016. [The reference to Max Ernst appears in the Introduction].

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Jung, C.G. On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C.G. Jung’s Lecture on Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Aurélia.’ Edited by Craig E. Stephenson. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Penguin, 1996, 2014.