After reading Italo Calvino's, Visibility, I became aware of the different ways verbal expressions come to be or how visual images are created as a source of the process of our imagination. He identifies two imaginative processes, one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image (mental cinema) and another that starts with visual image and arrives at verbal expression. The first one I thought as reading a book, you read a word and create a visual image, while the second one is more similar to what happens when we see a piece of art and we take that visual image and translate it and into verbal expression. Or like Dante would do, you had a mental image and translated it into verbal expressions. Dante's impressive imagination is used throughout all of his work, Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. As mentioned in the article, he had to imagine as a poet what the actor Dante was imagining, thinking, remembering, etc., which is a very difficult and admirable accomplishment.

 When Dante the poet describes Dante the actor's journey through inferno and purgatory, readers can easily put words into visual images, or at least I could. But, once Dante starts reaching Paradise, it became more and more difficult to visualize what the poet tried to portrayed because of his lack of verbal expressions. Less and less words were used to describe holy beings, which relates to what the author from Visibility means when he says, "the restraint that Dante seems obliged to impose on his own visual imagination when face to face with celestial visions of Paradise." Our human mind has limitations that become very clear when we try to understand and put into visual terms God's essence and presence. The author mention how the God of Moses did not tolerate being represented by visual images, but if we think about it, it might have not been that God did not tolerate it but more so that it was and is almost impossible to put God into visual,verbal, or sensual human terms. This is because God transcends the human realm and thus our human senses cannot and will never be able to fully visualize and understand God's Paradise.

The question I asked myself when reading Dante a year ago and as I was reading this article today, was how is it that Dante, although had difficulty putting into verbal expression and finding exact words to describe Paradise, knew how Paradise looked like? The answer to this question is answered in Visibility when the author quotes Douglas Hofstadter. Douglas says that much of this inspiration comes from heavenly inspirations that much like an iceberg, its inspiration is hidden or unseen deep underwater. Many times God's way of communicating with us is through ways that cannot be broken down into words but only kept in mental images or feelings.

The author reveals that for him, mental images are the catalysts to his work and that verbal and logic reasoning gives the images form and structure to portray a story. But, the visual solutions continue to be the determining factors even when thought nor language can resolve it. Although, he is very clear as to where his idea of imagination falls into in the two ways classified by Starobinski, I still can't fully agree with one or the other but the mix of both modes of thought- imagination as an instrument of knowledge and as a identification with the word soul. I believe that the mental images we create can have different sources of inspiration either heavenly or a earthly, mainly of what we see and copy from our daily lives. It is up to us to keep our imaginations flowing and push ourselves to keep imagining!