Communication Breakdown

In this post I want to talk about ekphrasis, and, specifically, I want to talk about how ekphrasis is something with which I struggle to fully understand.  It’s not the concept which I find exceptionally difficult.  A particular communication process, and one especially linked with literature, W. J. T. Mitchell succinctly identifies ekphrasis in Picture Theory as “the verbal representation of visual representation,” noting at one point that simple description is the lowest form of ekphrasis.  Ekphrasis is the verbalization of the visual, the use of language to cue readers towards specific imagistic renderings.  My problem is that language does not easily transfigure itself into images.  Instead, my mode of thinking is very strongly aligned with the linguistic.  Visual information is difficult for me to process as it is (I always get lost, and don’t ask me to find my car in a parking lot!), but to read a description of anything visual and then actually visualize it is near impossible for me.

When I read a scene that has strong imagistic details, I get easily lost in the text.  Instead of “seeing” the image described, instead of constructing an understanding of the visual space being described as I read, I simply hear the text in emphatic tone.   While I have a great memory for identifying from which text a particular quote is written or spoken, and can often remember specific details about intonation and the quality of the voice (esp. if originally spoken), years after I first encounter the material, the visual moments are difficult for me to remember moments after they occur.  And if it is a piece of ekphrasic text from a novel or poem, it is very likely that I will ever be able to comprehend the text well enough to remember it in the first place.

Here’s a secret: I am not a fan of Lord of the Rings.  I love Tolkien, and his poem about myth written after one of his philosophical/religious arguments with C. S. Lewis is one of my favorites.  The Hobbit?  Fun!  Wonderful!  But the Lord of the Rings trilogy simply has too many passages of detailed description.  I can’t keep the geography straight, let alone the battle scenes.  I have trouble converting even the smallest descriptive details into visual detail.

My personal failures at converting the linguistic let me understand what it is like on one side of the spectrum; to be able to convert what I read into pictures is not something I can understand.

This leads me to think of Temple Grandin. In the first lines of her autobiographic Thinking in Pictures, Grandin describes experiencing the world from the other side of the spectrum: “I think in pictures.  Words are a second language to me.  I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which runs like a VCR tape in my head.  When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures” (3).   Grandin, whose Thinking in Pictures details her life with autism, describes in great detail her struggle to understand communication and human interaction, and how her difficulty in understanding language in an abstract form complicates these processes.  Grandin explains how socializing with people is difficult because the way she perceives the world, and the way she perceives language and the process of communicating, is so different from the norm.  

Grandin, too, interprets language in a different way.  According to Grandin’s research, many autistic individuals are highly visual thinkers and, like her, will acquire a vast mental library of visual images that function as their communicative structures.  Many of the image associations would seem incongruous to others, especially images which get connected to abstract concepts.  But even simple imagistic concepts can be complicated visual associations that are too specific.  For example, Grandin discusses how the terms tree or dog recall specific trees and dogs of which she has attained personal knowledge through experience.  To interpret these terms outside the specific images she has already encoded with the terms is incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible for her. 

My real question comes down to this: concepts like ekphrasis are used and discussed as communicative patterns that are natural and universal.  Only, they are not.  The concept of ekphrasis is complicated by acknowledging that there is a range of effective interpretation of which some people simply fall along the outside. 

When we communicate, how much of our response is based simply because we assume the other person encodes and decodes information the same way we do?  I’m not talking about differences in beliefs or preferences, but the mechanics of interpreting.