On Images

In a Station of the Metro

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

Ezra Pound

SPACE.com/NASA/SDO/AIA - A burst of solar material leaps off the left side of the sun in what’s known as a prominence eruption. This image combines three images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on May 3, 2013, at 1:45 pm

What is an image?

I'm not going to make any kind of a serious attempt to answer this huge question but here are some random thoughts that occur to me.  I start with my native language, Hebrew, and with one possible beginning, the old testament.

There are four different Hebrew words with biblical origin that can be translated as “image”: TZELEM, DMUT, PESEL and TMUNA. Each sheds a different light on the nature of images.

“ZELEM” is derived from the word “Zel” meaning a shadow, the outline or shape of a shadow. It is mentioned in Genesis (1:26) in the story of the creation of man “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”.

“DMUT” is also mentioned in the story of creation meaning “resemblance” and “appearance”: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:”. The parent root of the Hebrew word is derived from the word DAM, blood (one descended from the “blood” of another often resembles the one descended from) and the child root of DAM is DAMAH meaning “to resemble”.

“PESEL” means literally statue, sculpture and the root PASAL means to carve or sculpt an image. The word is mentioned in Exodus (20:4) in connection with the prohibition to produce images which are created specifically to be worshipped.

“TMUNA” comes from the root MIN indicating type, sort, or species. Because all animals of the same species look alike, the word TMUNA, derived from MIN means a likeness.

Both “PESEL” and “TMUNA” are mentioned in the command that prohibits the forming of images after God's likeness “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth”. The command ensures monotheism, prohibiting the artistic production of other gods.

The four meanings of the biblical “image”: shadow, resemblance, likeness (sameness) and the production of divine images (both in the sense of divine activity and the produced image of the divine) indicate a split, a cut, a gap inherent in the very nature of “image”, in the very nature of any re-presentation, any image production.   Particularly in the context of the story of creation and re-creation, this inevitable slippage marks the tragic character of images.   We, god's creatures, carry by our very “of the image” being, the mark of immortal creativity, immortal creation, but at the same time, mortal as we are, we cannot retain perfection nor wholeness.  Likewise, the existence of image is defined by its own limits; a questionable existence that is always a shadow of the origin, a sameness of another, a likeness to other, a tangible object that yearns for “otherness”; other “nature” (immortal), other form or other meaning or as a resistance to all of those.  Human beings indeed, are allowed to create in their own image, like god, but unlike god, their creation is mortal.   In the same manner, man, like god, can create new images but they are doomed to belong in the kingdom of “Shadows”; a repetition, a re-production of an “origin”, a mere re-presentation of an “experience”, “idea”, “life” if you will.

Image in this sense, as well as creativity that propels its birth, is indeed tragic; I'm thinking about the longing for the source, the impossibility to attain perfection. I'm thinking of the inevitable distance between the subject and object, between experience and reality, between the actual line and it's idea. I'm thinking about the struggle of images to survive their own limits; The efforts to attain the unattainable and the inevitable drive that makes us create and makes us die into it and with it into a new one. So where do images reside? In that twilight, limbo, space with no end nor beginning, in the unfinished and the “undone” , in the process, the becoming, in the attempt, in the failure. We try and when we come close and closer to god we fall in our mortal trap. Small gods as we are, carrying the spark of creation and the ability to create, we produce images only to fall back with them away from paradise into the shadows where we begin again.