40in40, FTrain, bluishorange and many, many more
I admire self-revelatory writing.
I used to show a little more of myself in my blog, but for the last year or so (more?) , that side of things has largely dried up. It's partly to do with my adoption of other, more visual, media, but it's mainly, I've just decided, to do with how I experience the world and the difficulty I have in expressing that experience in words.
Someone has said that the trouble with email is that it doesn't have eyebrows. I would agree. I even find phone conversations difficult - even with the benefit of intonation and timing and extraneous non-verbal sounds and the eloquence of breathing, I feel emotionally disabled.
Face to face, I find it a bit easier. I need body language, microexpressions, pheromones, tics and subtle eye movements. I get some clue that my intentions have been, even vaguely, understood.
Quite often I start to write something for the web and when I read it back it seems dead, a spider corpse of letters - actually a spider corpse would be more eloquent, blurring on the wind-vibrated thread. It would have a past, a present, a crisp reality.
I hit delete. I go outside.
Some years ago, in a poem I wrote: Words are damp sponges. When writing these words I visualised two people throwing large water-soaked sponges at each other, as if in some fairground game, trying futilely to communicate, but just making a mess and thudding each other occassionally, to no result. (Perhaps even trying to write the poem down was a mistake - it seems clear that making a piece of performance art instead of a poem would have been more illuminating).
Looking back at the various threads of my more personal (for want of a better term) 'artistic work' I see that much of it revolves around the impossibility of expressing the reality of the experiences of my consciousness. Often it's about what it feels like not to be able to express that reality. I do use words, but often they are given meaning by their graphic (i.e. non-textual) context. Like these.
Perhaps recognising the unsuitability of words (as text) for my purposes will help me to start to use them again, or perhaps it marks the end of my feelings of inferiority and irritation at not employing them.
I hope you will excuse my aphasic gesturing on the web for a while longer.
Thank you.
1:48:43 PM 
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