To Think in Words.

To think in words- purely- so that the words anticipate the thought is to know that something can be said, that the full weight of realization can be held up on precise points of understanding. I saw a painting once of a girl at a window gazing out into an ocean which creeps right up to her windowsill. And everything in the painting, the curtains and her dress and the rag on the windowsill folds and flows like the ocean which blends into the sky. But the girl is just leaning there for a moment, resting from her work, caught up in infinity but indifferent to it. I see this painting and I think of the painter, the dreamer, chained to infinity, dragged away from the simplicity of that girl's humanity by his need to express it. He confuses her with the ocean, with the window, with everything that is not himself. I spin out words to tie myself to other things and I believe those words are real, more real than I am.