"[A mental] image ... begins as a vague, felt inner representation of some state of affairs and of our feelings about it. [1] As we have suggested, the forming of an image does not wait or depend upon conscious processes. The image unites 'information' and feeling; it holds together orientation and affectional significance. As such, images are prior to and deeper than concepts. When we are asked what we think or know about something or someone, we call up our images, setting in motion a kind of scanning interrogation or questioning of them. Then in a process that involves both a forming and an expression, we narrate what our images 'know.' The narration may take story form; it may take poetic or symbolic form, transforming nascent inner images into articulated, shared images; or it may take the propositional form of conceptual abstractions."Let me offer an illustration of this movement from the image as a vague internal representation of a state of affairs to the 'narration' of the image - in this case in poetic form. A friend of mine endured several years of persistent depression. Finally he took some rather decisive steps to alter his profession and personal life in an attempt to put the depression and its causes behind him. He and I were a long distance from each other when I heard of his action. The news of what had happened made considerable impact on me. As I thought over what he had been through and what he now experienced I felt the forming of an image that seemed to grasp his situation and my feeling about it. I attended to the image, feeling the internal presure it exerted and became aware that it called for expression and communication. As I sometimes do in that kind of situation I felt moved to let it find expression in a kind of poetic blank verse. With disclaimers about its quality, I share the 'analogues,' the specifying images, that my forming image of my friend and his situation - and its future - 'chose':
"The grosbeak sits in solitude"In its autonomy and creativity the image chose the analogue of a lonely, weary, sea-locked, spiritless and muted bird to bring itself to expression. I certainly had never thought of my friend in these terms, nor did I consciously know anything about grosbeaks. But then the image had more to express. Coupled with its grasp of my friend's desolation were also portents of hope and restoration. It continues,
An island, girdled with heavy mist
Moist, dank-shored, empty
The mainland murky.
Energyless, the head hangs
Skullpiece pounding
Beak clenched
Isolated
Wings wampled
Waiting.""Heart
Take heart.
The faint shudder
Of activated adrenalin
The heart-chest nudge of firing nerve
The foreign forgotten feel
A tide-burst of hope.
Beat sustained, beat accelerated
Readiness returning
Wampled wings waking
Sinews tightening
Muscles knitted with strange
New power.
Up Up Up Up Up Soar Pound Climb
SEE!
The Mainland lures."" 'Brought outside of me' in poetic form, the image is no longer simply private and unformed. We know something of what I, as the locus of the forming image, felt and sensed in my friend's state of affairs and its future. But no narration of a nascent image, whether in story, poem or conceptual form, exhausts the content of the image. Michael Polanyi is right when he says that we know more than we can express.[2] Faith, in its forming of images of the ultimate environment, never finds analogues that fully or with complete accuracy bring out and express its knowing. This is the practical reason why our earlier distinctions between faith, belief and religion are of critical importance. Belief or beliefs try to bring to expression what faith sees as it images an ultimate environment. Religion is constituted by the forms faith shapes for expressing, celebrating and living in relation to the ultimate environment as faith has imaged it in the past and image it now."
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