The relation of word to image is the origin of writing. A visual symbol or icon, that carries with it an association with a word, is called a pictograph. The pictograph is rather like what today we might term a “logo” which a designer creates to give a specific “identity” to some product. The Mohenjodaro seals are another example of a pictograph. From ancient times until the present day some artists, particularly in the Far East, use personal handcrafted seals as a way of “signing” their creations.
Letters for Tagore had a character of their own. They were in a way his “signature”, representing his unique personality.
Seals have often shown the way to linking the word to an image. A seal cannot be just simply de-coded as a system like a word composed by letters of the alphabet. A seal is a graphic entity which as a whole becomes a symbol or “icon”. They represent a way of identifying a person, but also a whole system of ideas. To give some very simple and obvious “seals” we may note how the form of a cross is associated with Christian beliefs, or a crescent moon denotes an Islamic identity. Seals can be incorporated into national flags, such as how the wheel, or “chakra” used by Buddhists like Ashoka, to denote the Law, was incorporated by Dr. Ambedkar into the Indian flag. The yin/yang pattern has also found its way into the flags of Far Eastern countries like Korea.
Many letters of the alphabet began as seals. The letter A for example, has a long history as an icon, representing the structure of a compass, with which a circle can be drawn. The circle itself is used as a letter of the alphabet, in the figure of O. In ancient Greek thought the Alpha and the Omega represented the beginning and end of all letters in the alphabet.
The Ancient of Days, 1794, William Blake
“When he sets a compass on the face of the deep.”
Originally the consonants were thought to be “things”, having a link with natural objects. The letter T was probably from ancient times associated with the structure of a Tree, as the letter W was used in pictographs to represent water, or S suggested the serpent, and the sound a serpent makes when it hisses. The Hebrew alphabet only used consonants. It was the Phoenicians who are credited with including vowels in a system of alphabetic notations.
The mysterious “sound” of AUM (OM) is discussed in a number of the Upanishads, and is given a mystical, interior meaning in the Prasna Upanishad, related to breathing. The pure sound which is composed by two vowels culminating in a labial M, is related to the cosmos.
The visual sign in the Devanagri script which represents this primal sound can be traced back to very primal patterns found in pre-literate symbols.
Perhaps we can trace the link between word and image to the multivalent meanings implied by impressions we receive through our ways of seeing, and also hearing. Both seeing and hearing rely on the way the mind interprets light and sound impulses. An ancient Tantric creation myth says that in the beginning there were cosmic waves of energy, which were first apparent as sound, but then were revealed as light. These energies finally became tangible by taking on concrete forms. In Indian aesthetics there is the idea of dhvani or vibration. This dhvani becomes apparent through our physical senses in objects which have “name (nama) and form (rupa). “
Human consciousness is closely related to the ability both to give form to what we see, and also to be able to name what we perceive as forms.
Tim Ingold, a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in U.K., has done interesting work relating visual forms to meaning structures that are basic to the way in which we think. There is a new understanding of what is termed “visual thinking” or “thinking with things”. Objects which we see, and use, are not just things that we touch, and which we manipulate, or consume, but they are also part of the way we interact with our surroundings, and contain memories that we fit into a whole world of impressions that shape our consciousness. Childhood memories, for example, are often most vividly related to objects, that are recalled through feelings of touch, smell, taste, that are primal encounters with our outside “reality”. Only at a later stage are these primal impressions ordered into visual and audial systems that lead to signs that we use for communicating feelings or ideas. These signs begin in the form of body language, but lead on to gestures, and markings that are the foundation for visual and audial ways in which we communicate with the world around us.
‘Mudra of the Teacher’ Painting by Jyoti Sahi
I first came across the ideas of Tim Ingold through his book on “Lines: A Brief History” which is a study of how graphic lines become the basis for a visual language. As an artist, I have been particularly interested in patterns, which are ways of interpreting order in what we see. The line drawn on a two-dimensional surface, is an abstraction. There are no “lines” in nature. We see lines or rather we “draw” lines as a way of thinking about patterns in nature. These ultimately are linked to patterns of thought. Thinking with lines, determines the way in which we see the world around us. It is a fundamental process of mapping reality which we call geometry, and which we use to record sensory data.
An example of using the alphabet playfully: Paul Klee, ‘Group W’ (1950)[i]
In a recent study by Harold Haarman on ‘Writing as Technology and Cultural Technology”, the author begins with a famous story, ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’[ii] .
The parable of the six blind men who try to understand the “form” of the elephant through their sense of touch implies that there are different ways of “seeing” an elephant as a conglomerate of many layered signifiers.
Thus one blind man whose “fall against his broad and sturdy side” through contact with the elephant’s body “began to bawl: ‘God bless me!—but the Elephant Is very like a wall’”
Another blind man, feeling the “smooth and sharp” tusk of the elephant, interpreted the object as being a spear.
The third blind man “happening to take the squirming trunk within his hands” declared that the creature in front of him was a mighty snake.
The fourth blind man who “reached out his eager hand, and felt about the knee” felt convinced that what he was touching was a kind of tree.
The fifth blind man who “who chanced to touch the ear,” declared that what the object he was investigating was most like a fan.
Finally the sixth blind man who began “to grope, seizing on the swinging tail”, came to the conclusion that what he had got hold of had the character of a rope.
In this way, the six blind searchers after the meaning of what was being called an elephant came to very different conclusions, depending on which part of its body each individual was touching. All were right in their imaginative associations, but ultimately all were wrong, because the part could never explain the whole. In the same way the interpretations we give to reality, relying on our most basic sense of touch, are bound to be what Blake termed the sensual impressions of an earth worm. That, the poet seer suggested was the problem with the scientific knowledge of his day, based on empirical positivism. The part was being confused with a vision of the whole!
One of the three Stones of Aberlemno etched with abstract Pictish symbols.[iv]
Haarman also discusses “Sign systems as constructs of the abstract mind”. He shows how petroglyphs are in a way the first “libraries’, and the study of our past is etched on stone.[iii]
In fact, the archaeology of the 19th century began with deciphering inscriptions on stones, and also in understanding the symbols related to ancient forms of currency. Libraries all over the world from ancient times have been store houses for images and texts that function as “museums of the mind” that not only help us to remember personal experiences, but also cultural heritages. They provide the stuff of cultural archives which are closely linked to technologies. Writing is a technology going back to the first tools that were not only weapons, but ways of making sense of the world in which we live.
A recent book by Ingold entitled, “Making” shows how making art objects everyday household artefacts such as baskets and vessels and modern gadgetry such as computer hardware both store, and provide cultural perceptions that are a language that finds meaning in objects. The well- known work on the “History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor is another example of how an object carries a world of meanings.
As technology develops new ways of making, the book is itself becoming a museum piece, in the same way that ancient petroglyphs, something carved in stone like an inscription on an Asoka pillar, are now items to be found in museums. Digital images, along with websites are the new “virtual libraries”. But however advanced technologies might become, and social media through virtual ways of communicating messages might develop, finally we find a link between word and image through our bodies, or the bodies of living creatures like an elephant. How do we read the world around us which we can touch? How far is the primary “book” a landscape in which we live, and construct to become a dwelling place? These are basic questions that face us as we think of the library of the future, and the way we relate to our cultural past and its relation to nature. The six ways in which the blind men of the Indian legend came to understand the creature which we call an elephant, is indicative of how many different ways of seeing there are. Seeing only makes sense if we recognize that in a way we are all born blind.
The word relates to the image through the bodily acts of storytelling and the making of gesture and this physicality can never be replaced by the virtual or disembodied forms of technology. The complicated patterns that are drawn on the threshold, variously known as Kolama, Rangoli and Alpana are “remembered” by so called “illiterate” women from a whole wealth of cultural patterns.
Kolam design, Karnataka
This memory of visual signs seems to be part of a whole physical response to meaningful patterns, similar to the way dancers can replicate complicated movements without consciously thinking about their steps and gestures. This kind of physically embedded memory is also recognized as a form of literacy in the way that a driver of a vehicle responds to traffic signs instinctively, reading their meaning automatically. Reading skills are to a large extent dependent on this kind of embedded knowledge which once learnt, responds without conscious thought. Body language is similarly auto-generated, as also the way in which singers remember the words of songs, in the very process of singing.
The innate human capacity to create images evolves in tandem with other forms of language, using written words, colour harmonies musical sounds, or body movements. To be human is to communicate with ones whole body as well as mind. The two are not separate, but two aspects of the same organism, like hands and head.
[i] Paul Klee on Modern Art: 44. (1967) London: Faber and Faber Ltd.
[ii] There are innumerable versions of this fable but one is the poem, ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant. A Hindoo Fable’ by John Godfrey Saxe
[iii] Petroglyphs are images created by removing part of a rock surfaces by incising, pecking or carving, Petroglyphs are found world-wide, and are often (but not always) associated with prehistoric peoples.
[iv] Scott Peck M. (1995) In Search of Stones: 364. New York: Hyperion.