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.