Project sample

Project

When you hear that I’m happy, perhaps you are happy for me, but you’re not happy in exactly the same way I am. How could you be? We are different people, and come at happiness from different directions and histories and states of being.

Take an "easier" word, like "between." The word can suggest a simple location: a position in the space separating objects A and B, for example. If you’re a middle child, however, the word may additionally carry a sense of being neither elder or younger, neither this nor that. To be "between things" is a euphemism for being out of work. "Between the devil and the deep blue sea" prompts a tune to play inside one’s head. These are all associations you might have with the simple word "between." And your associations may not be the same as mine.

Words also carry connotations. A connotation represents the place where the two continuums of meaning and value intersect. For example, a "building" is just a structure, while an "edifice" is more enduring and monumental. "Grandmother" is prim and elegant, but "Granny" rocks and smokes her corncob pipe. Instead of "happy" we can say we’re "elated," "delighted," or "totally blissed out."

Which word we use depends on exactly how we want to communicate our happy state and how we judge what our partner will understand. We exploit the connotations of language to "fill in" what the dictionary has left out. Connotations are what makes words glow.

And yet true communication is elusive, because, again, my connotation is not the same as yours, no matter how much we think we understand each other.

Yet what if we could "see" those connotations in our speech? What if we could take the "glow" of a word and give it a physical form?

Just as a visual artist uses paint to create images that suggest meaning, what if we could turn this process inside out and use meanings to create images?

Presenting the medium of speech in the medium of paint might teach us a lot about speech and force us to rethink the words we use and what we use them to mean. It would make the speech centers of our brains alive with synaptic input from new yet familiar places. It would enrich our speech with the dimension of image and activate the sense of sight as well as the sense of hearing. It would freeze the elusive shadings of meaning into fixed forms that could be pondered over and passed down, copied over and over, and endlessly discussed.

Or would it?

L. J. C. (Linda) Shimoda believes that it would. Her book is an exploration of language and meaning and communication through "image words" or "Glyphix." Through startling brush-and-ink images she is able to go beyond language without actually leaving language behind. Starting with a simple, ordinary word, she looks at its meaning, its associations, its connotations, all drawn from her history and imagination, and then creates a unique visual depiction of how that word "means" to her.

Instead of using more words to explain a single word, she lets that single word explode into form and meaning from within. And as that happens, the soul of the artist is revealed and communicated.

As book publishers, Stone Bridge Press is all about words and their meanings. We agonize over their choice and placement. And because our books focus on Japanese culture, I was immediately attracted to Linda’s Eastern-brushstroke approach to discovering what lies at the core of language. Creating Glyphix is the joining together of art, meditation, and personal spiritual growth in a single activity, in its way very close in motive to classical Japanese art forms like calligraphy, tea, and flower arranging.
So there was no question that we would publish this book. I am very grateful to Linda for her artistry and for being open to our suggestions regarding content and presentation. I would also especially like to thank my wife, Catherine deCuir, for using her journaling expertise to help show others how Glyphix can work in their lives.