Images created through some visible or audible medium give shape to the human experience of the world. The word “dry”, for example, can refer to many things. By itself it is not much of an image. But “dry as a bone” is. “Exhausted” is not itself an image, but “I felt like a wrung-out dishcloth” is. In both cases, the speaker has reached for some concrete thing in order to vivify abstract language. Dryness or exhaustion are states of affairs, and something in us mortals forever urges us to give shape–concrete shape–to these and other realities we experience.
We are coming up here to the word imagination, which is the image-making faculty with which we mortals are crowned. We have reason and will and affection and appetite–and imagination. We can scarcely open our mouths without reaching for some image. “Reaching” I just said. BUt I didn’t stretch out my arm here to grasp anything. It was “just” an image that presented itself naturally to my imagination int eh course of typing out that sentence. A few lines ago I said that the word “dry” is not, by itself, an image. But if I were to say, “Professor So-and so’s lectures are almost insupportably dry”, the adjective would conjure an image. An interesting question that comes trotting along (“trotting along”, he says) at this point is the question of the literal versus the fanciful. There is nothing literally “dry” about the good professor’s lectures, in the sense that the Sahara is dry. On the other hand, however, the image somehow not only does not attenuate the literal statement: rather it clarified it, or fortifies it, or vivifies it. The statement becomes tru-er when it is assisted by an image. I myself have always distrusted the –to me– cavalier remark, “Oh, that just an image. It’s not literally the case.”
No. Perhaps not. But the word “just” is a perilous one there. It implies that an image is “merely” this or that, and that it draws us away from the literal, which is the locale of the real, we would say. But does it? My own guess is that on the contrary, a well-chosen image draws us further into truth than, say, the syllogism, or the equation.
And suddenly we are head over heels in the mystery of the Incarnation. The Word of God, the truest thing there is tended toward concretion. “In the beginning was the Word…That event was very far from being a detour, or a mere charade, on the part of God. Nor was it a pis aller, as though God said to himself, “Hum. What strategy will answer to the collapse of things in that universe that I made? We’ve almost run out of ideas.” No…It is of the very nature of the Word that it tends toward Incarnation.” Or put it this way: we, who find ourselves in this species called man, seem to have an incorrigible wish to approach reality via the concrete.
(from The Night is Far Spent, p. 27)
