Topic 117: Mute Eloquence

Carol:

     A Picture IS Worth a Thousand Words

The origin of this now trite phrase appears to have been a 1921 article by Fred Barnard in Printers’ Ink, an advertising trade journal.  Guess he thought the idea was worth repeating because he recycled it in a March 1927 issue of the same magazine where he upped it to 10,000 words and attributed it to an old Chinese proverb. That’s advertising for you (source: Barnard). The derivation of this quote aside, a simple image can evoke emotions and awe  beyond the limitations of language. 

Consider the Alfred Eisenstaedt photo of the sailor and nurse kissing in Times Square on V-J Day August 14, 1945. This photo became instantly famous;

. . .[it] summed up the national mood in 1945 because it combined all the right elements: the returning soldier, the woman who welcomed him back and Times Square, the crossroads that symbolized home. (source: Michael Kimmelman quoted in Chan NY Times 1997)

Eisenstaedt  photo 1945

Eisenstaedt did not caption his photo, so the actual identities of the sailor and the nurse, who did not know each other, were unknown when it was published in Life magazine.    I think the power of the photograph is in NOT knowing who they were, in the spontaneity of the emotion that was shared by all Americans that day.  Mute eloquence.
 

Another photographer was in Times Square that day, and he took the same photograph.    Victor Jorgensen  was a Navy photo journalist, and his picture appeared in the New York Times the day after it was taken. Why did one photo became a national icon and the other fall into obscurity? Angle, lighting, and perspective.  The two figures appear awkward as if the young nurse were an unwilling recipient of the kiss. And, the other people caught in the journalistic photo are distracting. The eloquence is not quite there.
 

Jorgenson photo 1945

In January, Marc and I took a little trip to San Diego while Megan was at a conference. Ex-Navy that he is, Marc likes to go down to the harbor, watching for ships and numbers he recognizes from his West-Pac tour in the mid 1960’s. As we pulled into the parking  next to the  USS Midway,  we first saw  the  25-foot bronze statue of the kissing nurse and sailor, a 3-dimensional, Technicolor “adaptation”  of  Eisenstaedt’s  (or Jorgenson’s?) .  Out of its original context, blown up and colorized, the statue takes on a different significance. It seems less about celebration and victory and more about a stolen kiss, less about art and more about cartoon.

Johnson sculpture

 In attendance at the 2007 unveiling of the statue was Edith Shain, who  has now been officially identified as the young woman of the long-ago kiss. Said Shain at the ceremony,

"During the moment of the kiss I don’t remember much, it happened so fast and it happened at the perfect time. I didn’t even look at the Sailor who was kissing me," Shain continued. “I closed my eyes and enjoyed the moment like any woman would have done.” (source: Navy Today 16 Feb 2007) 

Shain and other World War II veterans   at the ceremony expressed strong emotion at seeing the statue. That kiss, immortalized in whatever form—art, journalism, sculpture, cartoon-- symbolizes the powerful emotions of a moment captured in mute eloquence.  A  picture is worth a thousand words.

Sources: 
Fred Barnard. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_picture_is_worth_a_thousand_words
 Sewell Chan article “When a Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss.” New York Times
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/that-times-square-smooch-right-to-the-kisser/
Alfred Eisenstaedt. Wikipedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Eisenstaedt
Seward Johnson. US Navy Today. “WWII Commemorative Statue Unveiled in San Diego.” Story Number: NNS070216-14 http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=27774
Victor Jorgenson. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Jorgensen

Megan:

Last night I asked my mother whether she thought there was much difference between today’s topic and one we’ve had previously, “On Holding One’s Tongue.” I expected her to concur with my whining tone that sometimes these topics get so repetitive and it’s hard to come up with new material.

Instead, she adopted a different tone, a familiar smug tone, and she said, “I think there is a huge difference and anyway I know exactly what I’m going to say. In fact, I’ve written most of it in my head.” Well, la di da! We both do that – write in our heads – but where I merely transcribe my thoughts exactly as I’m having them with no real form or idea where they’re going (have you noticed?), she takes hours and hours revising the sentences. With all that work, you’d think there’d be fewer typos.

Anyway, I suppose that “holding one’s tongue” intimates restraint, where one is making the choice not to say something, whereas “mute eloquence” seems to be a quality that one might observe in others. So, I Googled it and after perusing about 20 of the 16,500 results I can tell that it is a phrase common to romantic novels, poetry, and descriptions of sculpture and paintings.  But I cannot find a definition of the expression itself.  Luckily, I was born with the kind of brain that can form hyphenated meanings out of the definitions of the two independent words to come up with something like “silent-expressiveness” (or, if I reversed it: “clearly-dumb”).  In that vein -- the picture’s worth a thousand words vein-- then the frequent pairing of “mute eloquence” and sculpture and painting is apt.

However, if you hit the Image results of the Google search, you’ll find it is also a phrase people ascribe to photos of dogs (or rather, 3 pictures of dogs turn up in the first page of results). Even if I ever managed to get a noble looking photo of Milo (nearly impossible because, like a vampire, he rarely shows up on film), I would never think of that phrase to describe him.  Maybe "Vigilant Mama’s Boy" or "Bitey McSharpteeth" (when he’s hungry).

Creepy McBrightEyes