<< Embodiment of ideas

It’s a rather curious phenomenon, how poetry and written language are capable of transmitting ideas that we not necessarily have experienced but that we are capable of understanding.  

Expressions such as burning passion, or bitter cold seamlessly transmit to us ideas not possible in nature but that we still understand. Assigning characteristics to objects expand the dimensions of our understanding by establishing parallels from our physical reality that we can relate to.

It is an essential part of what Bachelard (and many others for that matter) refer to as the culture of the logos. 

The transmission of ideas through words as a way of organizing the world. At the risk of transgressing the boundaries of my own understanding, I must wonder if words are not simply higher versions of the pictorial elements integrating our individual alphabets. 

We are after all, creatures that thrive in storytelling.

The question deepens if we establish some sort of progression in the development of our capacity to transmit ideas through language. Starting from basic sounds, that evolve into songs and music (as historical pneumonic instruments to record our history and important events), to objects and buildings as landmarks of representation.

And moving on into elemental alphabetical characters (runes, icons), that later constitute broader societal agreements in which different linguistic aggregates express much more complex ideas that transmit without the need of experiencing the events directly.

This implies that as our first attempts of culture transmission go through pictorial representations of the world around us they evolve to accomodate complex thoughts. Which inevitably means that the logos is but a natural consequence of our development, a normal transition if you will from our pictorial nature.

It’s been discussed that as our technology evolves, we are going back again to a much more pictorial basis as a side effect dependency of electronical devices and communication technologies, 

I think this is a wrong understanding. There isn’t a clear distinction for me between the pictorial, oral and logos cultures but rather a sequence ultimately based in sensorial perception of the world.

We might just be adjusting once more to images as a way of moving forward.

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