What is a picture worth?

Please pardon the mess, brain under construction.  

Through keystrokes fueled by music, I am able to play with (but certainly not polish) ideas introduced to me in the college classroom. Here are my most recent ramblings:

“What is this life?” I find myself asking the Universe ten times a day. Is it a series of experiences? A good story?

The problem is that we haven’t figured out to translate emotions into words. When I want to express how I feel I want to put it into words so that I can share. I want to package my feelings into a code that others can understand. This code we often refer to as “language.” But, as we discussed in the course I’m taking in my school’s Religion Department this semester, maybe just by turning feelings and experiences into words we are taking away something vital.

In the same course, we talked about a hierarchy of communication/expression/experience where prose is the lowest form and either song or silence is the highest form. Which one is truly the highest depends on your religious tradition or spiritual orientation, but either way, song and silence are placed at the top.  

Where does the image fit in? The authors we read for the course believe that the things that are outside the body are not considered as holy as those that are inside. Is an image outside or inside? The moment it involves a technology, the camera for example, I suppose it could be considered outer. But some people, like me, have such deep connections with images, with photography, with moving film, with paint, that they get (what I understand to be) the same importance from those means of art as they do the art of words and the art of music. However, I might imagine that the photograph would be considered by some scholars of religion to be the lowest, lower than prose because it is a product. It is tangible and it is not spoken. Though, it is felt. It is interpreted within but produced outside of the body. That being said, a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words. How are we to make sense of that?

What about nature? Nature is outside the body and the mind. Though, when I am in nature I feel like I Know. I use a capital “k” to signify the experience of something bigger than oneself. I feel as though in nature I am communicating with the earth, and therefore something much greater than me. Can we communicate emotions through nature? We can share feelings by taking a friend to an important spot, an important place, so that they can experience it and maybe find similar emotions. Is that a legitimate form of communication? Is that less valuable that simple silence?

I haven’t used my camera much recently, so I cannot even provide an image that I think rightly communicates my feelings. My most recent images are portraits of people or buildings, taken in a style that reveals fact without much feeling. The camera is calling and I must go (get it? …like John Muir said “the mountains are calling and I must go”). But it's 3:00AM and freezing outside. 

Perhaps the camera will call again tomorrow.  

[I hope to share more thoughts on these subjects in the future. For every word printed here, there are dozens more racing through my mind.]