What's the qualm? That you're not sure you're "imagining things right" when you read a visual description?

That's the province of poetry in some ways - so much can mean anything, it all explodes from the statements irresistibly, like in Neruda.


Love Poem XIV

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Each time you read a book, you get to visualize it according to (with some help from the author),your vision. With movies, it's just the director's vision. Just like different actors interpret characters differently for Shakespeare's plays, except a lot of that is up to the reader. Visualization of novels is very mystical, and that mystery accentuates the alterity of the characters.

>>8092032

If in Borges' "The Circular Ruins" the sorcerer didn't dream the boy into flesh, he never would have become it. The magic of the situation is that the sorcerer moves from nothing of the boy through his beating heart and fingernails and flecks of iris to become a human fully formed and born. This is like reading, is it not? Can watching a movie have an analogue to this process?

Imagine the difference between photo-realistic painting and the impressionists or the expressionist. Movies can show you what it looks like to the eye, but a book can translate the experience of seeing it directly into the mind. You have control over the information that the participant receives about the object being observed, and with that you, the writer, facilitate more specific perceptions.

I think certain scenes in movies have so much emotional power not because of what is most basically shown but rather how those things suggest themselves to the imagination.

Look at this opening scene of Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtgLd9M_V6o

Ash sweat rain? Whole histories of love and Hiroshima become entangled in a single scene.

I got the same thing but with body's. I know literature will always be the better medium, but sometimes I just really want to play videogames instead. I haven't in over a year so I can focus on writing, but the fact that sometimes I want to makes me worry their somehow a more popular medium.

>>8092016
Book description conjures up every visual you've ever had, every person you've met, works them together, forces you to combine n create new things in your mind.

Book scenes and characters actually stay with you. Movies are ephemeral with very few exceptions