Things on my desktop.

Photo on 12-20-12 at 9.18 AM

Photo on 1-12-13 at 4.04 PM

I wanted to write about language, wanting to keep things a little more philosophical, a little less personal, but it was all prompted by the way I can hear my brain garbling things, and feeling more acutely than ever the product of an inaccessible past.

I was on the bus, describing things to myself automatically and half-consciously, and in reference to a willow tree I said something like pench-ing, a bastardization of the French verb 'to lean,' pencher, and the English grammatical morpheme 'ing.' I don't do that kind of thing too often anymore, but there was a time when every third person plural English verb I said had a felt but not heard -ent and every time I said 'you' to a teacher I wished for a way to distinguish it from the 'you' I would say to a friend. The gaps between our systems of understanding and expression are the most creatively fertile, and the most empty. I am endlessly fascinated with processes of translation, neurons to phonemes to mouth motions to sound waves to letters. Or, if you prefer, matter to light to lens to film to light to print. Or is that matter to light to lens to neuron to motor system to shutter to lens to film to light to print?