Cormac McCarthy - The Keluke Problem, Where did language come from

Fiction writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy wrote his first essay this year on the subject of language, and in his essay he suggests that the unconscious mind could (as in has the ability to) communicate with us in language (using words) but due to a lack of trust in the relatively new start-up that is conscious language, the unconscious prefers to use a more familiar communication. It uses the primeval system of images. The reason for this, he suggests, is simply that the brain is more used to functioning pictorially and prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether. The full essay can be read here. 
For me, an interesting thing this essay brings up; is there something illustration can get at that words cannot? How does that gap between text and the brain work? Or a better question, how is it different from the gap between image and the brain?
 

The fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesn’t much like language and even that it doesn’t trust it. And why is that? How about for the good and sufficient reason that it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years?

(Cormac McCarthy, 2017)