Whence did the wondrous mystic art arise,
of painting speech and speaking to the eyes?
That we by tracing magic lines are taught
how to embody and to colour thought.
William Massey
I love words. I love the way they stack tidily or pile loosely together to form the architecture of ideas . Writing stands at the beginning of history. The written word connects mankind across the ages. Through their writing, I am connected to poets and thinkers who are long dead. As Thomas Carlyle wrote in the 1800s:
In books lies the soul | Of the whole past time | The articulate audible | Voice of the past | When the body | And material substance | Of it has altogether vanished | Like a dream.
The act of writing connects the unseen world with the physical world. It crystallizes thoughts and allows them to be turned over and examined, tasted and built upon. And for me, it is the physical revelation of the metaphysical structure of the ideas; a reflection of the shape, texture and color of the phrases; and the integration of the words' texture and color with their meanings