The Goddess’ revenge spells oppprtunity for video

It looks like the Goddess is making a comeback over the alphabet, and that is good news for my daughter.

Leonard Shlain argues that in the mists of time, the masculine / left-brained / inventors of the alphabet staged a coup over the feminine / right-brained / painters of the pictograph. In his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Shlain combs the arc of human history for proof of the victory of word over image. To Shlain, a cardiologist by day and anthropologist on the side, the fall of the Egyptian queen, the rise of the male cleric, and the sanctity of deterministic science are among the results of this shift from image to word. He believes the pendulum is swinging back as screens grab territory from paper.

Shlain’s thesis came to mind this week while having my recurring “I’m a word guy and you’re a visual guy” conversation with freelance videographer Tom Cherrey. Tom suggested that there are more limitations on video storytelling than on word storytelling. I bought the point at the time, primarily because my fledgling attempts at video storytelling are shining examples of these limitations — you can’t re-create what you failed to capture, your canvass is more restricted (time, viewing frame, technology), and the camera doesn’t lie.

But later I read Kathy Hansen’s compilation of online video stories and followed the links. Some the of the videos are head-scratchers (just as a lot of poems escape me), but I viewed several that demonstrate visual advantages over text. Forever’s Not So Long  is a short story in video. The characters’ emotions and the practical implications of Armageddon are efficiently keenly channelled in 13 minutes of cleverly edited imagery and dialogue. Gary tells the story of a young boy conquering desire and does it so well that monolingual me could understand it, even though the dialogue is in French.

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess came to mind again while watching Sir Ken Robinson say that educational systems around the world have been built to create industrial workers who need math, science, and language skills, but not creative ones. His TED talk includes a story about Gillian Lynne, who broke out of the public education mold to become the successful choreographer of Cats. Gillian would have been diagnosed with ADHD, given medication, and told to conform if she was in public school today. But conformity would have smothered her genius. How many others are thus smothered by a system that nurtures only a certain kind of intelligence?

This brings me (finally) to my 8-year-old daughter. She is more a goddess than a scientist, that’s for sure. She is bright, witty, and creative (in a Jackson Pollack sort of way). But she does not read well. Ideas and words do not live in tidy file drawers in her brain. They are scattered about and she accesses them in her own artful, experiential way. Yet we have her on medication because we cannot bear to see her struggle in the traditional classroom and her parents’ alphabet-oriented view of the world cannot see her happy if she does not read or write well.

But maybe Slain is right and the goddess is rising. I am as alarmed as any writer by the drastic decline in reading, but who’s to say that our journey on this planet is any less enjoyable and meaningful if we communicate more through feature films, documentaries, slide shows, music vids, and yes, even video games?