Some time ago I watched Bill Moyers interview the writer Barry Lopez and found his replies to Moyers' questions so intriguing that I downloaded a transcript.
When Moyers asks him what it means to be a storyteller, Lopez recalls a conversation he had with a fellow novelist, a man named Kazumasa Hirai who told him:
"Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language." And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.
That metaphor – the word as a vessel – is true as well for the image.
