hot water watching water boil in a pot on the stove. the way the condensation on the lid looks like rain on the roof of my parent�s old car: liquid shades of green and grey shifting infinitely, an inky leopard-print pattern in kaleidoscopic motion. remembering the weight of a camera in my hands, trying to catch images before they shifted away, learning to capture them with my mind instead. missing being an eye that needed no words, an eye that saw and shared in ways that required a feeling separate from language and semantics. an eye unburdened by the limitations of a language that cannot properly express the range of human understanding. watching water boil in a pot on the stove. realizing that i am missing a limb but learning to live without it, learning to try to express the world in all available formats. i think that writers are often artists who are unable to create their visions in visual format, for whatever reason, and seek out words to try to explain the sculptures and paintings they construct in their minds but cannot execute. like janet fitch writing astrid's artwork in white oleander or audrey niffenegger's detailed descriptions of clare's sculptures in the time traveler's wife. the art takes on a different kind of beauty as the reader forms their own idea of what it would look like in visual form - it is art in a constant state of transition, it can never be just one thing, one image. |