Thought for the Day

When you look at something long enough it can seem strange and uncanny. I asked myself what do we think with? What are thoughts anyway? The thoughts of this boy were long long thoughts to alter Houseman’s line a little. How long is a thought? Can we apply a temporal character to a thought or a series of thoughts. At 6 a.m. I woke suddenly and thought ‘I am going to court today’. Cerebral activity is taking place of course but does that give a time stamp to the consciousness?

Are thoughts images? Can we think in images? Could we imagine a series of images representing a logical sequence or an imagistic syllogism. The Imagists thought so. A haiku creates evanescent clarity, or a thought that is momentary but also abides as a continuing mood.

Normally we imagine that we think with subvocal half sentences and phrases of the sort that Joyce tried to capture in Ulysses. Language at its most abstract is founded on the concrete. The word ‘character’ has an interesting etymology coming from the Greek ‘kharassein’ sharpen, furrow, scratch, engrave probably from a base meaning ‘scratch’. I’m inclined to think that this may be related to the craftsman’s scribe or gauge defining width or thickness. The block or board thus defined limits what what can be done with it. It’s a fixed given, or a character.