THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND IMAGES AND MEANINGS [Pascal Bentoiu, “Imagine și sens (Image and meaning)”, Bucharest: Eikon, 2023]

Abstract

It was only after I read the en­tire volume did I understand that the title Image and Meaning, which the author gives to his book, should also be accompanied by a subtitle – The Book of Revealed Mysteries. For me, this is the only way such a title can be deciphered. And understanding re­quires analogies. As many. At first, the thought took me to The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the famous writing of Joseph Campbell, because there it is also about the images and mean­ings of a single reference, albeit a mythologi­cal and archetypal one. I wouldn’t have ruled out One Thousand and One Nights either, where Scheherazade acts narra­tively on Padishah Shahriar’s imagi­nation, converting him to empathic hu­manity. Exactly as Rimsky-Korsakov presents the two in the first part of the famous symphonic suite. In a second sequence, I thought that in the case of music, the phrase image and meaning get a relevant analogy in the binomial form and content and further – structure and expression. I also assumed that it was about the images and meanings of the music, not even the same, from the consciousness of the receiving audience. How else? But no. It was about much more. The seed of the future revelation was planted for me from the very first pages when I understood that in the same way that when listening to a symphony orchestra, I hear three „choirs” accompanied by percussion, so also when, for example, I listen to a symphony, I perceive the synchronous interference of several kinds of music. A „choir” in several voices, in several images, synchronously broadcasting several meanings of the same musical material.