Images in Words

Here is a quote from a great novel: She took out a picture of her daughter to show it to him. “No tell me what she looks like in words” he said. (From To the End of the Land, written by David Grossman).
 

How do you render in words what is depicted in lines and colours? It isn't easy, is it? Pictures don't say anything, the show something.
 

There is no exact verbalisation. A computer programme could perhaps convert a picture into other forms of data – splitting it into millions of pixels, each of them with a specific mixture of cyan, magenta and yellow. But it would not give any meaning – unless for another computer, which could recreate it as an exact copy of the original.
 

A description of a picture would be different for every person who made the attempt. It would to some degree convey the attitude and feelings of the one making the attempt. It might be a faithful, reproduction – but not an exact one.
 

Can words convey things that an image cannot? Something more than a precise mechanical representation? Something with a human touch to it?
 

And in the opposite direction. Words into images. You read a book, and in your mind you translate the words into pictures of characters, landscapes and situations. Different pictures for every reader.


I remember visiting an old castle. I looked at one of the paintings on a wall. A strange landscape and strange animals. Some big grey animals with a long peculiar nose, some spotted animals with a long neck. They looked like nothing I had seen before. I realised that it was a very old painting, probably painted on the basis of a verbal description by someone who had been in Africa.
 

If a story is made into a film, the pictures will already have been created for you. And they are the same for everyone.
 

Pictures of the Prophet Muhammad are not allowed. There must be billions of them in the minds of the believers.