Maybe Gendlin was referring to the raggedy dead tree in the lower center of this painting below, wasn’t he?
Anyway, in the section ‘f-9) Discursive use versus art; re-eveving versus re-recognition’ (Gendlin, 1997/2018, pp. 178-9) in ‘Chapter VII-B: Protolanguage’ of “A Process Model,” Gendlin contrasts words and visual patterns. In particular, he emphasizes the quality of the visual patterns:
Suzanne Langer, on the other hand, emphasizes the characteristic that words do not depend on sound quality:
Gendlin argues that “the tree also has to work together visually in terms of line and color patterns with the rest of the painting” (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 178). Langer also makes much the same claim that visual forms present their constituent elements simultaneously:
In the passage above, Langer’s argument that it is “not discursive” to present the constituents simultaneously rather than successively is probably related to her statement that the characteristic of “discursiveness” has traditionally been thought of as follows:
However, Gendlin notes that not all words function as discursive symbols, “It doesn’t matter about the sounds, except in poetry-which is again a type of art.” (Gendlin, 1997/2018, p. 178)
Langer also mentions that poetry has non-discursive characteristics:
The above is why my introduction to Gendlin and Langer’s arguments does not address what Gendlin most wanted to argue in the next section, “f-10) New expression” in “Chapter VII-B: Protolanguage,” which is as follows:
However, I am confident that it may be helpful to at least understand “f-9) Discursive use versus art” as a preliminary step to “f-10) New expression”.
References
Gendlin, E. T. (1997/2018). A process model. Northwestern University Press