16/05/08
Occasionally, I think there's something oppressive about the way you can
never stop reading, once you've learned how. To look at a word is to
understand it; there's no intervening stage. It's almost like telepathy -
someone can drop an idea straight into your brain, without needing to ask
your permission first. In the end, you hardly see the word at all and
only the object it represents. When I write 'apple', do you really see
the series of letters or do you just see an apple?
Though I say that, but I've found that I have a fairly visual mind
compared with some people. So maybe a whole bunch of you do see the
letters, and you're now wondering what the hell I'm talking
about.
I ended up thinking about this again, after coming across the poem
Cardinal Ideograms by May Swenson. I hadn't heard of it
before, but it seems quite famous, so maybe you have. It reminded me how
hard it is to see the shapes of numbers and letters without seeing the
things they represent as well - even though there's nothing essentially
different between them and any other random collection of lines. The
difference is in our heads, not in the world.
Anyway. Enough of that crap, I'm going to pack. And maybe turn a fire
hose on the troop of teenage howler monkeys outside. I don't care if it
is Friday, they're really starting to piss me off.
