an overly idealistic attempt at a poetic essay

imago mundi

                only a draft

Images and the image

          —for it is only an image—

                                  of man—

                                      grayed out,

                                      corpulent, but

                                      sickly, (as a

                                      corpse)

                                      corpulent with info,

                                      sickly in mind.

Problems will perpetually plague

words—written words—

and they hulk yet larger in

the epoch of today.

Films, films, films.

“The Avengers was awesome.”

“Hey, you watched Divergent?”

No, I watched The Godfather.

But let me talk about films.

They’re the apotheosis of the

Image.

Moving images,

And thrill,

And you know I’m talking about the

Action film that Marvel/Disney has perfected.

The cume of these films are

Staggering

And the extent of their influence

Is enormous,

And, I won’t be a snobbish elitist here,

I love Marvel films (not Divergent, please spare me),

But they do eventually become scratchy disks

(But that metaphor isn’t relevant anymore, is it?)

And the thrill is gone away.

But I’m off on a rabbit trail

(Notice the inordinate amount of beginning conjunctions).

The reader will be alienated—

The serious reader I mean

(But what delineates “seriousness” in a reader, huh?)—

Because the reader doesn’t get the image pre-fab.

The reader has to create,

Become a co-creator of the image,

Has to actually use the faculty of

Imagination.

Imagination is usually lost after childhood,

But the reader who has read from five,

Who has read under covers with a flashlight,

In the car, in the bathroom,

Retains some of that imagination, no matter how vestigial.

I, for one, associate imagination with books,

Old musty books—

Wardrobes to Narnia, private portals to god-littered Greece—

Books which jump from thought to thought now,

Because the pages are like the hairs of my dad’s head,

Stressed out.

The book demands use of image-ing,

And children don’t mind,

And hence the teen, the grown-up who carries in the pockets of the heart

Some residue of child-ness,

Doesn’t mind, at least not as much as the non-reader.

But the pervasive pull of the image that requires

Minimal work

Affects even the reader.

                                        I mean,

Look at the state of the novel.

The Hunger Games, film-adaptable?

Yes. Divergent, Maze Runner, and what have you,

All adaptable for the silver screen?

You betcha.

Not that the popular novel hasn’t been perennially full of schmaltz,

But that it is now losing the one commendable quality it carried:

The impetus for imagination.

But now, how does the literary novel react?

Murakami and Rushdie both

Seem to think that the response apposite is to

Hie to the Weird Cave.

Franzen et the disaffected al. will not deign to use commonplace vocab.

But the power of evocative imagination is very much within the grasps

Of these, but what?
Filmability? 
Franzen has it, a bit.
But go back half a century. The 
Southern Gothic pack. 
Adapt Walker Percy's novels, Faulkner's.
Can't, huh
?

Rabbit trail again.

                             (I’m tired, can’t think.)