Over the last few months I have written some compelling,
thought-provoking articles on a variety of subjects – whether women are too far
out or too far in to be considered outsider artists; how women use their bodies
as well as their voices to express outrage instead of sexuality; which moments in
time really matter in women’s history.
However, unless you are
gifted with ESP or some other form of mind-reading, you probably missed these
articles. That’s because they exist
only on the media platform known as my mind.
I did not treat these pieces lightly; they were more than
random thoughts that flitted across my mind and then vanished never to appear
again. I spent a lot of time with them. I thought them through; I researched material
and interviewed subjects; I attended events and jotted down notes in a
notebook. I even edited the copy, debating which words to use and what titles
to give each piece. But ultimately they remained imprinted only in my
consciousness and not on paper.
Now the mind is a very powerful thing. It can affect the way
we feel and behave, it can influence our health and our emotional state. But
one thing it cannot do is write. It cannot, on its own, change thoughts into
concrete form. One might say that words have their own ephemerality (perhaps a
made up word, but it does say what I mean). The squiggles on a piece of paper
have meaning only because we have collectively and culturally assigned a certain
sound and a certain sense to them. Nevertheless, they are more corporeal than
thoughts. They can be shared, they can be preserved.
