The idolatry of images, their mythical aspect, and falling in love

People and images: a deeply weird, slightly obsessive relationship.

I’m a millennial, and like almost every single person of my generation, I spend most of the time of the day staring at the screen of my smartphone. But it happens that my sight gets tired of seeing the same thing 24/7; so every once in a while, I feel like changing the background image, once again. This happened to me yesterday, so when I was at my leisure, during a ten-minute break from work, I devoted myself to the search of the next perfect image to put on my screen.

And here it is, this is the one I chose:

The mental process of choosing an image is something quite intriguing to me. An image is a muted work of art, a silent piece of life, a minuscule pixel of the human experience. Although I prefer to say that it’s muted rather than silent, because muted implies that it could speak, it aims to communicate something to you, but because of its nature, it cannot turn that message into sound.

How many times have we not heard the phrase “that image speaks to me” –a little too sentimental, maybe, but true. Images do speak to us in unimaginable ways, but usually in a form of an internal monologue that we construct in our minds while staring.

What is it that we do in museums, anyway? We stand in front of a painted canvas, a sculpture, an installation or whatever object, and in external silence, we stare. We question ourselves, we question the piece.  And then we say “I liked it very much”, or “I didn’t like it”, or “that one made me sad”, or happy, or hopeful. We can even dare to say “I loved it!”

 And it’s fascinating when you think about it: how full of feeling and life, and how vulnerable are we that we can fall in love with something that we saw for only a couple of seconds, or maybe one or two minutes, at most.

But of course it is our own personal obsessions that we see in all the images that surround us, whether we like it or not. And are we not so tempted to say that it is not the image, but the meaning that we give to it, what moves us? And isn’t that exceedingly cliché in western culture? Certainly it is. And it’s getting kind of boring, to be honest. (Maybe I should move to Thailand, or the Tibet, or Japan, to see if people over there relate to images in a different way than we do in this part of the world…)

One day, not long ago, I asked for the counseling of a Yogi. It was a man that had been practicing yoga and constant meditation as part of his ordinary western-style life, and was very happy with it. I, in contrast was very anxious at the moment, desperately seeking inner peace. He told me that meditating is way simpler than people think. “You can meditate with any image that you want”, he said. I remember being quite astonished by that statement, and when I asked him how, he explained to me that meditating simply consists in staring at something without thinking about it, and concentrating all your energy and all your senses into the quiet action of looking. His instructions were something like this: “Lit a candle, put it in front of you, in a height aligned with your eyes when seated, preferably in front of a neutral background, like a white wall, for example, and devote yourself to looking at it. Describe the flame, its colors, its slightest movements, but don’t reflect about it. Let you mind concentrate exclusively on the image, and meditate.”

It would surely be interesting to try that method the next time I go to a museum or an art gallery…Maybe that way one could get closer to understating the image itself, instead of getting so distracted with our own internal, self-centered monologue.

(But I must confess that I still don’t get the idea of meditating with almost anything, I could try observing a tree, or an apple, but could you imagine someone meditating with a poster of Madonna? That would certainly freak me out)

Anyhow, it is indeed strange the idea of voluntarily staring at the same image for a long period of time, when everybody is doing the contrary: it’s no secret that the visual exposure that we have to images nowadays is huge. Our eyes rarely get a chance to rest. Every day we go through Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, twitter etc., and take a quick look at thousands of different images without even stopping. So, could we stand more than 10 seconds staring at the same thing?

Obsession and love: two siblings separated at birth

It’s funny how we say “I can’t keep my eyes off of you” when we’re in love with somebody. Under that state of mind, anyone would be happy to look carefully at the other person for an entire century if it was possible…You see, love is closer to obsession than we like to believe.

But Oh, the spark of falling in love! It’s magical, beautiful, and exciting, it’s like watching a million fireworks explode in front of your eyes. Falling in love is –and it always will be- an incomprehensible phenomenon of human life. How does it work, when does it start, and when does it end? Us poor humans, we’re never sure of anything regarding love. With this sort of thing, it’s all about believing: some believe there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and some believe that the whole thing is only a myth.

In an attempt to shed some light on the subject, I grabbed the dictionary and looked up the word “myth”. This is what it says:

Myth: a fictional story, a literary or artistic character that incarnates some universal aspect of the human condition.

Falling in love is real, I’m sure of it. But can we say the same about the whole issue of finding “the one”? To what extend do we tend to “mystify” that person that supposedly is our one and only, our other half, our soulmate, or whatever you prefer to call it. And then again, to what extend does the image that I chose represents that cultural myth?

There’s this marvelous book, a novel by the Argentinian writer Ernesto Sábato, titled “The tunnel” (a classic in modern Latin-American literature), and the story goes a little like this: Juan Pablo Castel, the main character which is a painter, gets totally obsessed with a young woman that he saw in one of his expositions, while she was staring at one of his paintings. He insists on the fact that the young lady was the only one who truly understood the painting, and feels the urgent need to find her, and talk to her.

I remember that while I was reading the novel, I was never sure if he even loved her, to me it seemed like the main character was on his own personal search for something, some metaphysical question about life and its purpose, and the whole attitude of this girl, which seemed at first a clue to him, a silver lining, a ray of hope, turns out to be nothing more than his internal monologue going on and on in circles.

I’ve always thought that it is easier to fall in love with an idea, a myth, or a mental construction… But let’s not get confused here: this is not the real thing, I mean the myth, the character, the image, the painting. No, the real thing is way more intangible than that, I honestly believe that love, real love, is way over all those things.

But poor Castel wasn’t able to differentiate the myth from the person, and his obsession ends up damaging his soul, and he ends up killing the beautiful Mary, the personification of his obsession and desire. (Don’t worry, this is no spoiler, the novel starts with Castel himself declaring that he’s guilty of murder.)

Anyway,

As for myself, I’m quite comfortable with believing in myths and idolizing images, the first I think that is inherent to human nature, and the second is just a casual thing that we do in the 21^st century. But the third thing, love, that I want it to be a reality.