Short answer would be No. But, it's somewhat same to think whether one can create a delicate meal out of Van Gogh's Starry Night, or is it possible to remake Bach's Mass in B minor into a poem. While such attempts can be done, and an ingenious artist might make something great with such an effort, the result will be nothing like the original.
I love books, which does not mean – primarily – that I like having some rare editions in my bookshelf; it means that I love how the world speaks to the imaginative unconscious & works its way into conscious thinking by reading good books. Fiction, in a way, is the best of all, since it is more evocative than dry fact. Occultism might even said to be a form of fiction in this regard, since it does not seek to be exhaustive in the same meaning of this word that would be, for example, an encyclopaedia of insects, or political history. We might remember that learning empathy has been connected to reading fiction.
There are different ways of seeing/feeling the world, according to one's temperament. Once again I miss sodalis obnoxion, whose imagination is pictorial (if I've understood right), and who would most likely manage to reconcile my own feelings to the very pictorial world of our modern times. But since he will be absent for some time yet, can any of you give me comfort?
For I admit that I hate how pictorial our time has come. I loved the early internet with its forums – like this one –, I tolerated the later adaptation with Facebook, but I have a very hard time accepting the Instagram internet we nowadays have. Where there is very little interest in actual discussion, or changing evocative thoughts, but just an instant picture, instantly reacted on, instantly dismissed. It feels so cheap that I truly feel like we might be facing another dark age with illiterate masses worshipping pictures on the church walls without knowing what they represent. Gutenberg is dead, the great possibility of illumination it brought is being swiped hastily away.
Pictures are our astral language, and there is nothing wrong with the concept of pictures. There is also nothing wrong in wanting to live and think quickly. There is even nothing wrong about surficiality, when it is just a part of the thing we have, and not the whole life through and though. I am not saying that our time would be worse than the past, per se; rather, that we have created tools which can be used to either ascend or descend more rapidly, and if we do not wake up to that fact, the collective laziness makes the choice for the latter.
No one would nowadays be anguished by burning of a Bible. But sadly it is impossible to burn with gusto a sample Netflix, which would certainly arouse strong feelings.
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Even though I placed this discussion on the section of Art, I would also love to hear your thoughts about the pictorial world at large. For example, I claimed that by the pictorial world, we are instantly talking about astralism also. You might consider pondering & commenting this.
