Representing The Mind Of The Subject
I was reminded of how iconic the pumpkin has become of the fall season. Pumpkins are carved by children for Halloween jack 
o lanterns. The carvings are displayed by proud parents as decorations on the front porch. At the thanksgiving feast pumpkin is the main ingredient of a delicately spiced pie.
I passed an Episcopal churchyard yesterday that was strewn with pumpkins of various sizes. Apparently the church was selling the orange squash to raise funds for a charity. Business appeared to be good. Later in the morning while attending to service for customers, my eye was attracted by a big, colorful, artsy representation of the pumpkin displayed prominently in front of Whole Foods. The garish object failed to capture the simple form, the delicate, rich harvest-orange of a pumpkin, — its essence.
The nineteenth-century European and American realists were so realistic that their pictures were totally unlike what they were supposed to represent. And the first thing wrong with them was, of course, precisely that they were pictures. In any case, nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the imitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject: that that is something else again.
Man is the image of God, not his shadow. At present, we have decided that God is dead and that we are his shadow….Take a picture of that, Jack!
—excerpt from Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
