Words. I lost them for a while there. When Scottish Husband's treatment for cancer came to an end last summer, I'd just sit and look at my blog and past entries meant nothing. My words, my thoughts meant nothing. Nothing mattered. (Well actually my painting did, but my words had gone).
Instead I read. Voraciously. And each time I picked up a new book, it seemed to be written just for me.
'Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo when words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become,
when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like a sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film.
When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like 'I walked down the street', or take a phrase from a newspaper, 'economic measures which lead to the full use of ....' and immediately the words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can't write any longer'.
Excerpt from The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.
Painting above:
A few steps to the water, Sanna Bay, Ardnamurchan, Scotland.
Paintings of Scotland by Melanie McDonald, click for details.
