We’re a strange lot. We like things to be perfect and have trouble understanding when they are not.
For example, we expect our doctors to be fit, healthy and in the peak of condition. Were they dogs we would expect them to have a shiny coat, a wet nose and nuzzle our genitalia with evident relish. When we find doctors stressed, deathly pale, and wincing as they move, we worry.
But why? A deaf musician might be thought a contradiction, but it was little trouble to Beethoven, or Fauré. The painter, El Greco, had a serious eye complaint. Then there’s the double amputee Oscar Pistorius, one of the fastest runners in the world, widely referred to as ‘The Fastest Thing on No Legs’.
Why can’t our dentists be snaggle-toothed? Why can’t our doctors get ill? Surely, some of them will get the flu. One or two may even die. What’s wrong with that?
In Britain we love a little harmless eccentricity. Indeed, we revel in it. We adore our corrupt politicians, for example, and when they emerge from open prison we interview them at length on television and give them high-powered jobs in government. When they prove to be drunks, we experience a fellow-feeling for them. Sins of the flesh – we all suffer from that.
Yet, somewhat unfairly it seems to me, we insist on strict sobriety and cold detachment as the proctologist advances towards us with a glinting scalpel. This is an unfortunate double standard.
Luckily though there are fresh avenues opening all the time in our brave new world for those who like to be eccentric and wish to benefit from our national attribute of tolerance. For example, it has recently become clear that society at large no longer requires communicators to be able to communicate. Specifically, reading and writing is not considered a necessary skill in the job. No longer do communicators have to be able to listen to people and explain their ideas cogently. Jargon and the use of buzzwords are now fine. And thank heavens for that. It will certainly make things easier.
What a relief it is to be able to look at these people with the same tolerance and love of eccentricity as our politicians. They add a touch of colour and amusement to our otherwise drab lives. After all, isn’t there something heroically distinctive about writers who can’t write?
And when you come right down to it, there is much to be said for those that gun down others in the street. All right, they exhibit no strict sense of community, and seem bad mannered. But who cares about manners these days? It’s so rear-view mirror. Aren’t these people just doing what we would like to do ourselves? It would be hypocritical and intolerant to condemn them, and we can’t have that.
Perhaps I should stand for parliament.
© Roger Murphy 2008
Friday, 25 January 2008
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
The Word
“In the beginning was The Word,” says Saint John.
You have to say it’s a strong opening for a gospel. If you were going to write one, you’d want an opening like that. And it’s certainly not bad for a man in his 90s. There’s no Bethlehem birth, no donkeys, no shepherds, no wise men, no shining star, no melodrama. It’s straight in to the mysterious heart of the thing: “In the beginning was The Word.”
Of course, as he wrote in Greek the term he actually uses is ‘logos’. We know the word logos, but for us it is a plural and in the singular is an image. It is curious that our word for a word is a word for an image. Still with me?
It is interesting that we have separated into two disciplines what the ancient world considered one. For them word and image worked together to communicate, and since more people ‘read’ the image than the word, the Parthenon was friezed with sculptures. Images were considered to be the most powerful words. In the theatre too, words and visual representation went hand in hand. The vital ability for a writer (or orator) was imagination – that is, the ability to conjure images in the mind with words. This was true either in pnyx or agora, the legislature or marketplace.
Yet in our own time two disciplines that are separate have grown out of this unity, the visual and the verbal, and increasingly communicators are experts in one or the other of them, but rarely both.
With it has grown the notion that those involved in the image (photographers and designers) cannot read, and those involved with the word (writers and editors) cannot visualise. Were they alive today, Phidias would be considered a bit of a moron though quite handy with a chisel, and Demosthenes would be thought a visual illiterate, though a promising speech-writer.
Of course there are those who see it as their bounden duty to prove the fallacy true. Which is why an especially unpleasant part of hell is reserved for designers who do not read the text before designing, as well as for editors who are dead to matters visual.
But these days when literacy is common, designers must realise that their fundamental purpose is to enable things to be read – more easily, more swiftly, without obstacles. They should consider their work to be a form of writing, of communicating the essence. A designer who does that enhances the written word. And this is his function. It is content, and therefore meaning that must be put first. Image and design must both serve it.
So the 90-year old from Ephesus had it right. Take a look at these wonderful opening pages from St John’s gospel and see how, even in the Middle Ages, this concept of visual and verbal unity was still alive, how the very act of placing quill to parchment was an act of complete devotion to meaning. In these respectful hands, letterforms are things of immense beauty. The meaning, the word and the image become integral. For the writer (St John) and the illustrator (who would have been a Benedictine monk labouring by candle-light in a cold scriptorium over a thousand years after the words were first written) this unity of purpose gave their work great power. These works still illuminate. They show us like nothing before or since that the power of good communication lies in a unity of visual and verbal purpose.
By the Middle Ages, the text of the gospels had been rendered from Greek into Latin. These illustrations of the first page from St John’s Gospel therefore use the words: ‘In principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat verbum.’
© Roger Murphy 2008
You have to say it’s a strong opening for a gospel. If you were going to write one, you’d want an opening like that. And it’s certainly not bad for a man in his 90s. There’s no Bethlehem birth, no donkeys, no shepherds, no wise men, no shining star, no melodrama. It’s straight in to the mysterious heart of the thing: “In the beginning was The Word.”
Of course, as he wrote in Greek the term he actually uses is ‘logos’. We know the word logos, but for us it is a plural and in the singular is an image. It is curious that our word for a word is a word for an image. Still with me?
It is interesting that we have separated into two disciplines what the ancient world considered one. For them word and image worked together to communicate, and since more people ‘read’ the image than the word, the Parthenon was friezed with sculptures. Images were considered to be the most powerful words. In the theatre too, words and visual representation went hand in hand. The vital ability for a writer (or orator) was imagination – that is, the ability to conjure images in the mind with words. This was true either in pnyx or agora, the legislature or marketplace.
Yet in our own time two disciplines that are separate have grown out of this unity, the visual and the verbal, and increasingly communicators are experts in one or the other of them, but rarely both.
With it has grown the notion that those involved in the image (photographers and designers) cannot read, and those involved with the word (writers and editors) cannot visualise. Were they alive today, Phidias would be considered a bit of a moron though quite handy with a chisel, and Demosthenes would be thought a visual illiterate, though a promising speech-writer.
Of course there are those who see it as their bounden duty to prove the fallacy true. Which is why an especially unpleasant part of hell is reserved for designers who do not read the text before designing, as well as for editors who are dead to matters visual.
But these days when literacy is common, designers must realise that their fundamental purpose is to enable things to be read – more easily, more swiftly, without obstacles. They should consider their work to be a form of writing, of communicating the essence. A designer who does that enhances the written word. And this is his function. It is content, and therefore meaning that must be put first. Image and design must both serve it.
So the 90-year old from Ephesus had it right. Take a look at these wonderful opening pages from St John’s gospel and see how, even in the Middle Ages, this concept of visual and verbal unity was still alive, how the very act of placing quill to parchment was an act of complete devotion to meaning. In these respectful hands, letterforms are things of immense beauty. The meaning, the word and the image become integral. For the writer (St John) and the illustrator (who would have been a Benedictine monk labouring by candle-light in a cold scriptorium over a thousand years after the words were first written) this unity of purpose gave their work great power. These works still illuminate. They show us like nothing before or since that the power of good communication lies in a unity of visual and verbal purpose.
By the Middle Ages, the text of the gospels had been rendered from Greek into Latin. These illustrations of the first page from St John’s Gospel therefore use the words: ‘In principio erat verbum et verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat verbum.’
© Roger Murphy 2008
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