Iconic

We went into the city centre yesterday, to check whether Susannah and Noah's feet had grown (they hadn't). There's a shopping mall on one side of the station; the State art gallery, museum and library in a fairly bleak square on the other. We had lunch at the art gallery, and I just had to take this image of two women drinking coffee beneath one of the greatest iconic images of the twentieth-century: Marilyn Monroe's face, depicted in coffee-cups of five clours (white, and four shades of brown) on a dark brown background...

We live in an iconic age: images so familiar we don't even notice them at a conscious level, but which tap-into our sub-conscious mind (in this case, Marilyn singing Happy Birthday to JFK; goofing with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in Some Like It Hot; that white dress being blown up by the hot-air vent...all images from before I was born, but which are part of my shared Western popular cultural memory.)

The Word became flesh. The Western church has looked to the written word to point to the Word. The Eastern church (e.g. Greek and Russian Orthodox) has looked to icons to do the same. In this regard, it would be timely for the West to look to the East...