Words and Images 4

Here’s the fourth image in Magritte’s essay:

Un object rencontre son image, un objet rencontre son nom. Il arrive que l’image et le nom de cet objet se rencontre.

An object encounters its picture, an object encounters its name. It so happens that the picture and the name of this object encounter one another.

So far as I can tell — and I’m not making any great claims about how far that is — this frame mostly prepares for the next few. Magritte juxtaposes the sketch of a forest with the word “forest” to problematize the notion that one of them designates a forest more truly, more durably, more necessarily than the other.

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Jacobs on Tufte

Just a note that Alan Jacobs, whose A Theology Of Reading meant a lot to Margaret when she was working on related issues, reviewed Beautiful Evidence in a recent issue of Books and Culture.

Words and Images 3

The third image in Magritte’s graphical essay is:

Un mot ne sert parfois qu’à se désigner soi-même:

Sometimes a word serves only to designate itself.

I’m not altogether sure what to make of this one. The word in the illustration is ciel, “sky”; perhaps Magritte simply means that the noun “sky” doesn’t refer to an object, but to an undetermined conceptual referent (what, after all, is “sky”?). Certainly the word ciel doesn’t just refer to itself in the same way that the word “word” refers to itself. I’m open to suggestions on this one.

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