A Picture? Or a Thousand Words?

I recently heard this narrow slice of our modern era—the late 20th, early 21st century—described as the “age of image.” The notion behind it being that our use of information today is primarily image-based rather than word-based. 

It’s not hard to see how this is true. Consider that in the last century we’ve seen not only the advent of digital media, but—going waaay back—of picture books for kids and pop-culture magazines that have had their verbiage squeezed out a little each decade by images. Our children today, and for the last couple of generations, really, have been raised, educated, pacified, and entertained with images. 

This would seem to speak to the old proverb that a picture is worth a thousand words. But is it? The answer, of course, depends on the words. For example, one picture cannot express…

• a mission statement
• your epitath
• a knock-knock joke
• what Emily Dickinson can with 10 words
• the simplest legal document

I understand what the maxim means to say: that some pictures—pieces of photo journalism come to mind—communicate ideas, truths, impressions that could not be captured in the same way with words. I don’t dispute that. But there’s a kind of job that images can’t do. They can’t argue. Not really. Images can’t present claims. They can’t reason syllogistically. They can’t sequence premises, conditions, and conclusions. For communication that compels a reader to action—whether the action is a change in thought, an emotion evoked, or a purchase—we need words. 

I am not proposing that words are innately better than visual images. That would be like saying trees are better than clouds; each has value within a particular context. And the context in which words have value is that of human thought and expression. More than these even, words have value that's rooted at our most fundamental essence. The power of words for humans is derivative; i.e. God first used words to form creation, and our use of them derives from being made in his image. Words are permanent (they can't be replaced by images) because they’re somehow essential to existence itself. 

So we can call this the bit of history—and the next one, and the one after that—whatever we want, but one thing’s certain, we’ll use words to do it.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1

Merry Christmas!

Last night, as is the tradition in my extended family, one of the kids read the Christmas account from Luke 2. And though the angel proclaiming the news to the shepherds does refer to the child as "Savior", the focus of the narrative is on the circumstances of Christ's birth, not the reason. To fill out the reason, we can look to other scripture.

Here in Paul's letter to the Colossians we have the objective of Christ's incarnation:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

And in his letter to the Philippians, we have the attitude that such a mission required:

...Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. 

So the baby in the manger came to die, "to reconcile to himself all things...by the blood of his cross." And while it's true that Christmas points to Easter, we should be careful here. To say that one celebration is better than the other (and I've heard the statement before) is to miss the point. The objects of both Christmas and Easter celebrations are part of the same story, which is the story of the entire Bible and the whole of the Christian faith--that God is a redeemer and he redeems at his own expense.

As I teach my kids to think about the incarnation (and it's an amazing thing to ponder), I must remember that it fits within a broader context--the whole gospel of Jesus Christ.  

Merry Christmas!

Put Christ Back in Christmas? No way.

Before you read this, you might brush on these two stories: 

Nadab and Abihu and unauthorized fire

Uzzah and Ark of the Covenant

God knows our hearts. In Exodus (c.20) he tells the people that when they erect an altar they’re not to add images to it. In fact, says God, don’t even use a tool on the stones or you’ll “profane it.” This prohibition, this tether on the Israelites’ creativity was not repression but kindness. He knew then, as he knows now, that once a tool was applied to the stones, the next thing to follow would be a carving, an image, something aesthetic and more to their liking than plain field stone. And of course, one image would not suffice. The unadorned stones would cry out for the same treatment, and soon the entire altar would be swallowed up in a work of art. So what’s wrong with art?
Nothing, in and of itself. Creativity is part of being made in God’s image, so it’s good. But art, visual art especially, when it comes along side worship won’t be content as an aid. It will make itself front and center. We like to see things. We crave image and spectacle, and our sinful hearts will always turn from the invisible and the realm of faith and bend toward the visible and the realm of the senses, especially if the visible thing is made by our own hands. The Bible calls this idolatry.
We don’t need to look far to see this error play itself out to its logical ends. Just open your eyes between Thanksgiving and New Year's. What began as an aid to worship, a special season marked out on the calendar to celebrate the incarnation (seems innocent enough), has become an orgy for the senses. The “aid” itself has taken center stage, making Christ a bit player. So we need to put Christ back in Christmas, right? 

Wrong.
God never asked for our help here. Nowhere does his word prescribe the Christmas celebration or anything like it. And it’s no wonder—he knew we’d screw it up. He knew we’d get out our tools and start carving away, and we’d end up with something more aesthetically pleasing, more to our liking. He knew we would fashion an idol. What arrogance then to think that worship, as God himself specifies it, requires any help from us. Forgive us, Lord.
Instead of putting Christ back in Christmas, let’s do this: let’s recognize that he never asked to be there in the first place. Let’s use our tools for what they were meant for—subduing the earth and having dominion over it. And let’s let God determine how we’ll worship him.

And if Christmas for you is more about presents and eggnog and, yes, even family, then take Christ out of Christmas, lest his name be profaned. He's King of kings, after all, not a bit player.

Contentment and Martyrdom

I've been reading through Revelation (it's never the same book twice, is it?) and was struck by this:


[The beast] was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.
   
   If anyone is to be taken captive,

   to captivity he goes;
    if anyone is to be slain with the sword,
   with the sword must he be slain.

   
   Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints. (c.13)


Whether you read this as a future event or one that's already passed doesn't matter. Either way it's scary because it presents a plausible death for any Christ follower. We might die by a sword or a bullet or a bomb. And our profession of faith might be the trigger. 


I think it's a perfectly healthy practice for Christians to consider their own martyrdom. I do it all the time. I hear some horrible, glorious story of endurance through persecution or faithful testimony in the face of torture, and I wonder, "What would I do?" And then I remind myself of how God's grace comes to us in our time of need, that I'm not strong enough or courageous enough to withstand such trials, but that Christ is and that he'll provide what I need when I need it.


It's the gospel, and it's all true, of course, but today I had another thought. What if I'm not calling out to Christ now? What if here in the day of small things, when torture is a clock that ticks too slowly and persecution is a student who snickers when I say I went to church last Sunday--what if on days like these I habitually try to get through them on my own? Will I know how to persevere in Christ under a "big" trial when I can't or won't do it under a triviality? 


I'm thinking no.   


I murder time. I hold the clock in contempt and despise the day of small things, and it’s a flat-out sinful act of rebellion. The small days are just as much God’s unfolding of his will as are centuries and millennia. Same goes for the circumstances that fill them. Cancer and colds are both God's, both to be used as sanctifying means for his children, and we're to seek him in both.

So while it's a hard lesson, and one I'll have to learn again and again, it's always true that I can always be content because I am always in the exact circumstance of God’s ordaining. Whether it's a Monday afternoon meeting or a 7pm diaper change on Tuesday or 4th hour on Thursdays, I'm always where God my father wants me. 


I'm just now learning to see that enduring such times alone is stupid when I have the gospel. I need God's grace to be content where I'm at, and I need to practice it daily, for there can be no doubt that someday I'll need his grace for a day of bigger things. If I'm not depending on Christ now, I probably won't do it later. And that makes passages like Revelation 13 really scary.

Writer, Proof Thyself

Proofing your own copy is like tickling yourself—you'd think it would work, but it doesn't. Just ask Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Here’s the complete title of her book:

Eats, Shoots and Leaves:

A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation 

And in the subtitle we find, of all things, an error in punctuation. The compound modifier zero tolerance, because it modifies a noun immediately following, needs to be hypenated, as in zero-tolerance approach. 

(It’s a great object lesson for anyone proofing copy, but don’t let the slip-up prejudice you against Truss’s book—it’s a great read, and no, I’m not forgetting that it’s about punctuation.) 

The more time a writer spends with a piece of work, the more familiar it becomes. If errors aren’t caught early, the writer’s eye and brain (they’re the same organ, really) will begin superimposing correct form onto the copy. You’ll read it correctly because the sentence’s content and syntax encourage you to anticipate and assume the correct form. It’s nothing new; we see what we want to see. 

Some remedies:

• spell check is a start, but it will miss distinctions between words like wear and where
• reading aloud is helpful for broader form concerns like sentence fragments, misplaced or dangling modifiers, and style, but it won’t catch spelling and typo problems
• reading copy word for word in reverse—this eliminates the brain’s assumptions about form since there’s no syntax to hypnotize you. This is a good complement to reading aloud as it will only catch spelling and typo errors.
• farming the copy out to a proofreader for one last pass

But your best bet is to be doing all four. That’s the true zero-tolerance approach to proofing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need my wife to read this before I post.

Weird: Dillard's Insight into Sight

In a recent post, I looked at how sight and meaning develop together, that we only ever see a thing with our physical eyes if there’s a corresponding knowledge of it in our brains. But what if the brain develops apart from sight? What if we’re born blind? What then?
What happens then is just downright weird.

If I had to cite only one writing influence in my life it would be Annie Dillard. And if I had to recommend only one of her books, it would be her break-out, Pulitzer-nabbing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In it, she writes, among many other things, on the phenomenon of seeing. She refers to an account by Dr. Maurice von Senden of surgeries done in the early 1960s on congenital cataract patients (blind from birth) and writes,

“...The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden's opinion, no idea of space whatsoever. Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient ‘had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.’ Before the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing.”

It sounds crazy. A blind person touches a ball and a cube. He’s given sight but can’t tell by looking which is which. The problem with our understanding of what’s going on here is that we can’t separate out the experience of shape without sight. The two are too closely tied. Try it yourself. Put something in your hand and close your eyes. The skin of your fingers and palm, the muscles of your arm holding the object’s weight are drawing on visual sense memory to “create” an image of the thing in your hand. Your brain can do that because the visual information is there and retrievable. For a person blind from birth, there are no such files to draw from. But there are plenty of touch files. So the newly-sighted patient looks at the sphere and cube, and shrugs. But he reaches out a hand and touches them, and knowledge is there, as instantly as turning on a light in a dark room.  

Their perceptions of themselves occupying physical space were just as bizarre as the ball and cube. Dillard writes:

“Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, ‘I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to show me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart.’ Other doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect. ‘The room he was in ... he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger. . .Those who are blind from birth . . . have no real conception of height or distance. A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps. . . . The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal.’”

Reach out and touch the screen or the coffee cup in front of you. The thing only exists for you in space because you know space visually. Your arm is extended out, slightly down, and touching the coffee cup, and you can imagine it sitting on your desk 18 inches away because the knowledge of physical space is already there. You know the context. But what immediate knowledge does a blind person have of such an object? The knowledge of hard, smooth, and cool, of arm muscles contracting a certain way--all touch sensations that don't have anything at all to do with space. Imagine, if you can, a brain formed in that way, for which sensation is primarily touch and feel. There could be no perception of space (as the sighted know it) because space is purely perspective and perspective is purely visual.

I look at my screen now, and can see the edge of a picture frame. I know the monitor hides the rest, the image of Elizabeth, because the idea of space and that something can exist behind something else is a visual thing. Now try to imagine--and you can't, but try anyway--by sense of touch alone, something hidden behind something else. If you're a seeing person, or even if you've not been blind for life, you can't do this without bringing in the visual. You can't do it because the whole phenomena, for us the sighted, is one of perspective. And your perspective is based on visual perception. Even with your eyes closed, it’s based on memory of your visual perception. Ideas like behind, in front of, and hidden only exist as a function of perspective.

One more thing. Of the accounts of Jesus healing folks while he was here on earth, I’ve always thought this one strange: In Mark 8, Jesus heals a man of blindness. He does it in stages, and after the first round of spitting and laying on of hands, the man says to Jesus, “I see men, but they look like trees walking.” Like trees? Until I’d thought about these matters of sight and blindness and perception, that always sounded strange to me. Trees. It doesn’t anymore. It makes perfect sense. A tree to a person born blind is man sized, limbed, up and down. So I thought this especially fascinating: Dillard, quoting von Senden, writes, “One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that ‘men do not really look like trees at all.’” hmmm.

Told you it was weird.

Nouns - the Last Frontier

We’re running out of frontiers for carrying out our dominion mandate, but I think I’ve found one—the world of nouns. Not the concrete kind. Those have it easy. They get named as soon as they’re sighted. But the abstract kind, situations, particularly—they’re the shadowy corners of the word world.

Here’s a few that I’ve taken the liberty of naming. I’m not sure that I’m really the first to do it, but I don’t see any flags planted on these, so I feel ok about it. They’re in dictionary format to make them seem, you know, real. And there’s an example for each because I’m, you know, an English teacher...

1. sermat (sir maht) n.: the sudden, sometimes awkward silence that can arise during group discussions. (Note: there is a belief that sermats occur most often at 20 minutes to and after the hour; this is a stupid belief.) From the Latin sermo meaning to talk and the Greek stamato meaning to stop or pause. Ex: A lively discussion on God’s sovereignty flowed on into the early hours, interrupted only by the pizza-delivery guy and the occasional sermat.

2. floscus (flah skus) n.: the explosive effect that can occur as one takes the very last bites of a closed, sandwich-type food item. From the latin fluo, meaning flow, and esca meaning food. Ex: You’re getting near the end of that burrito, Lewis, and that’s a clean shirt—watch out for the floscus!

3. incurputation (in ker pyu tay shun) n.: an encounter in which two people, approaching from opposite directions, attempt to pass by one another; but in the attempt to make room, each chooses the same side, thereby running into the other. This is often followed by a series of similar side-to-side moves as each participant tries to get past the other. Incurputations are often terminated by one or both parties smiling or laughing awkwardly and saying something like, “shall we dance?” Variations include two or more cars starting and stopping simultaneously at a stop sign, a European kiss to the check where the parties bump noses, and introductions between people from the West and Far East in which the opposites can’t figure out whether to bow or shake hands and so attempt to do both, alternately, clumsily, ineffectively. From the latin incurse meaning to collide and the Greek perpate meaning to step or walk. She had determined to make an elegant entrance into the restaurant, but a blushing incurputation with a waiter spoiled the effect.

There. Flags are planted. Time to go look for more land.