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Art, in all its manifestations, transcends dark emotions and gives your mind a chance to escape from bleak areas. My constant call has been to flee from the dark reality to art, as its fields are more spacious than mere framing and preoccupation with space; it grants wings for soaring. Here, we can ask: What does art do to us?

Well, we live in the age of the image. I attended a lecture by the photographer Issa Ibrahim titled: Narrative in the Photograph: Memory of the Eye. This took place at the Narrative Forum in Kuwait City as part of the activities of the National Council for Culture, Arts, and Letters. In it, the artist Issa presented many diverse images in their themes and contents, striking and artistically astonishing images.

During the presentation, there was an exchange of dialogue between the visual and the narrative from the audience. My friend, the creative novelist Taleb Al-Rifai, was sitting next to me, so I posed a conditional question for the artist photographer Issa Ibrahim and the creative Taleb Al-Rifai: Assuming there is a striking image, can the novelist write it into a novel, and can the photographer draw a narrative for Taleb Al-Rifai that carries the written narrative details?

This is a question that extends like a plastic carpet. Although I was aware that this could happen, the rush of questions and the limited time of the lecture prevented us from hearing the opinions of both the writer and the photographer. I was eager to mention the story of the image with me while narrating a novel, specifically the image of the old woman Mas'ada in the novel "The Clay." The character was stored within me with her actions and stories, and her image was hazy in my mind. In one of the magazines, I found a picture of a gray-haired woman, time having devoured her deliciously, leaving only features that hinted at a beauty obscured by wrinkles that marched like a line of ants across her face and traveled to the veins of her neck with relentless persistence. An image that deepens the narrator's imagination to express what the years do in terms of shocking changes, and the narrator must delve into explaining her story.

The image of this old woman continued to gaze at me from behind the glass desk, her face overflowing with evasive smiles, from narrow eyes and a mouth with a faint smile, and a headscarf that revealed the white hair of her head like cotton tufts remaining unharvested, with collarbones protruding like a mast that had received many axe blows.

Every time I wrote about the old woman Mas'ada, I saw the image laughing from behind the glass of the desk, belittling or dismissing what I wrote about an imagined woman while she was a present woman in her image. I remembered this as I watched the photos taken by artist Issa of many women in different situations. He photographed them and stopped there; the images we saw were ones where the photographer did not concern himself with their inner feelings, their human history, their daily struggles, their living conditions, or what makes them cry or laugh. Yes, the images he presented were numerous, and those who view those images, who create the story, feel what the character endures through the image. So, who is the creator of the narrative of the image, the artist or the viewer?

I was also eager to touch on Taleb Al-Rifai's novel "Dukhi... The Facets of Youth," which featured a cover image of the great Kuwaiti artist Awad Dukhi. Was the image the narrative, or what Taleb wrote about the person in the image the narrative and the facets of life on the writer of the narrative and not the image?

I believe that everything around us, between us, and within us is an extended narrative state. So, who is the creator of that state? Is it the image, or what we say in words, or what we imagine when we see? The cave of narrative is akin to a black hole that swallows all our stories and does not reveal the hidden depth within us when it is hastily consumed or during our fleeting lives in time. The narrative is an exchange between death and life.