"A picture is worth a thousand words;"
But pictures never change.
The picture's meaning fades
Like rust on a thousand swords.
Words have much longer range
and infinitely sharper blades.
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Permanent Loss
I am in mourning. You'll think it is stupid, but I don't care. You'd think I'd learn from my past. It wasn't the first time I'd been so stupid. I cried. It was stupid. It was unique. It was ultimate.
When I was in college 6 years ago, I was reading Oscar Wilde and I brought it out to BC to visit my friend Dan. We drank heavily that night and needed something to mix with vodka, so I went and bought a cheap gallon of orange juice. The morning after I took it with me and threw it in my bag so as not to waste it. It popped open and poured a half gallon of orange juice out over everything in my bag. Oscar Wilde was ruined. I never even got a replacement until someone bought me one six months ago after I told them the story. I never thought I'd do the same thing again six months later with something much more dear to me than Oscar Wilde.
I write. When I say that, I mean it in two ways. I write for a living and I also hand write everything. I type what I write in my notebook afterward. In the last week, I wrote two amazing scenes for my novel. They were dramatic and poignant and riveting. I had not had the chance to transpose them into my computer yet. My friends and I planned an excursion last Saturday and alcohol was involved so I put a bottle of Jameson whiskey in my bag. It leaked last night and destroyed my notebook. It is soaked entirely through and half of each page is a blue ball of blurred nothingness. I lost the two scenes.
It is unique because it is ultimately gone: the words I wrote, the language I weaved, the scene I created. They are gone and never to be duplicated or retrieved. It is like the death of a human being. I have never had a child and I have never created something such as this that I have loved like a child. Its death hit me sideways. I will write the scenes over again. The content will be the same. My memory is good enough that it will hold the spirit of the scenes I already wrote. But it will not be the same. The problem with this is that I almost feel like it is a perversion of the memory of the words that were destroyed by breathing new life into a replacement.
When I was in college 6 years ago, I was reading Oscar Wilde and I brought it out to BC to visit my friend Dan. We drank heavily that night and needed something to mix with vodka, so I went and bought a cheap gallon of orange juice. The morning after I took it with me and threw it in my bag so as not to waste it. It popped open and poured a half gallon of orange juice out over everything in my bag. Oscar Wilde was ruined. I never even got a replacement until someone bought me one six months ago after I told them the story. I never thought I'd do the same thing again six months later with something much more dear to me than Oscar Wilde.
I write. When I say that, I mean it in two ways. I write for a living and I also hand write everything. I type what I write in my notebook afterward. In the last week, I wrote two amazing scenes for my novel. They were dramatic and poignant and riveting. I had not had the chance to transpose them into my computer yet. My friends and I planned an excursion last Saturday and alcohol was involved so I put a bottle of Jameson whiskey in my bag. It leaked last night and destroyed my notebook. It is soaked entirely through and half of each page is a blue ball of blurred nothingness. I lost the two scenes.
It is unique because it is ultimately gone: the words I wrote, the language I weaved, the scene I created. They are gone and never to be duplicated or retrieved. It is like the death of a human being. I have never had a child and I have never created something such as this that I have loved like a child. Its death hit me sideways. I will write the scenes over again. The content will be the same. My memory is good enough that it will hold the spirit of the scenes I already wrote. But it will not be the same. The problem with this is that I almost feel like it is a perversion of the memory of the words that were destroyed by breathing new life into a replacement.
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