23 April 2008
Patchwork Writing on the Labyrinthine Nature of Thoughts
)Published on April 23rd, 2008 @ 08:08:24 pm, using 971 words, 118 views
Sometimes I feel like my thoughts are doomed to run full circle. No matter what seed they stem from, what route they follow, they will always run right into something else that’s come to me in the form of a thought. I don’t quite know what to make of that. Whether to believe my thoughts are limited in scope (that it’s a small world for thoughts as well as people) or to cogitate the possibility that I may be trapped within a maze looking for a way out, where a wider range awaits me. Or still to flatter myself that I may have a knack for matching thoughts, for recognizing both the outlines of puzzle pieces and the fractional images contained therein… a knack for tying up loose ends in a way.
Photograph by isolano (FLICKR)
Once again I bow to the genius of Stewart Osuisu Hirideyo ♥
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More of my favorite passages from The Invention of Solitude:
And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually seeing.
As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world). What he experienced perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of this room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others. and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance. If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory.
By the time of his third birthday, A.’s son’s taste in literature had begun to expand from simple, heavily illustrated baby books to more sophisticated children’s books. The illustration was still a source of great pleasure, but it was no longer crucial; The story itself had become enough to hold his attention, and when A. came to a page with no pictures at all, he would be moved to see the little boy looking intently ahead, at nothing, at the emptiness of the air, at the blank wall, imagining what the words were telling him. ‘it’s fun to imagine that we can’t see,’ he told his father once, as they were walking down the street. Another time, the boy went into the bathroom, closed the door, and did not come out. ‘What are you doing in there?'’I'm thinking,’ the boy said. ‘I have to be alone to think.’
The words rhyme, and even if there is no real connection between them, he cannot help thinking of them together. Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room. Breath and death. Or the fact that the letters of the word “live” can be rearranged to spell out the word “evil.” He knows this is no more than a schoolboy’s game. (…) Playing with words in the way A. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world. Playing with words is merely to examine the way the mind functions, to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it. In the same way, the world is not just the sum of the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meaning of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other. ‘Two faces are alike,’ writes Pascal. ‘Neither is funny by itself, but side by side their likeness makes us laugh.’ The faces rhyme for the eyes, just as two words can rhyme for the ear. To carry the proposition one step further. A. would contend that it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well.
Possible epigraph(s) for The Book of Memory.
‘Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me.’ (Pascal)
‘As I write down my thought, it sometimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my own weakness, which I am constantly forgetting. This teaches me as much as my forgotten thought, for I strive only to know my own nothingness.’ (Pascal)
… everything. as has been noted before, is connected to everything else. And if there is everything, then it follows there is everyone.
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Thoughts, words, full, circle, scope, range, limited, trapped, maze, labyrinth, knack, puzzle
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