A Pause Between Yes and No

Away at the horizon, almost like a line of trees, are the picture makers on whom I depended. Most of them I never met. As Jane Hirshfield wrote in a poem to Richard Hugo, ‘I’m sorry I missed you in this life, and send you blessings’.

—Robert Adams, Acknowledgments section of “Turning Back”

What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the “civilization of the image”? Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images? At one time the visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage of his direct experiences and to a restricted repertory of images reflected in culture. the possibility of giving form to personal myths arose from the way in which the fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.

—Italo Calvino in “Visibility”, and essay in “Six Memos For The Next Millenium”