I tumbled for words at once . . .

One of my favorite pieces of writing is Dylan Thomas' "Notes on the Art of Poetry," something he wrote in the early 1950's and which has appeared in a number of different forms.  He talks about having loved words before he could even understand what they meant:  "what mattered was the sound of them . . . and these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who miraculously found his hearing." 

 [Beautiful textures by Original Art Studio and Flypaper Textures]

I can't remember a time when I didn't love words -- like Thomas, I tumbled for them at an early age and have been tumbling for them ever since.  I hear that some people think in pictures, but I never have -- I think in words and have odd words and phrases floating in and out of my head all day, a sort of "Greatest Hits" from a lifetime of drinking words in as if they were a 15-year-old Armagnac, rolling them around on the tongue, feeling their warm glow as I take them in. At any given moment, if we were able to do a Vulcan mind-meld, you might hear echoing around in my dark cranium:

. . . Tarquin's ravishing strides . . .
. . . the multitudinous seas incarnadine . . .
. . . alabaster crematoria . . . 
. . . Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow . . . 

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. . . yondir boyes in hir bryghte weedis . . . 
. . . on the most on the molde on measure hygh . . . 


Many, but not all, of my "floaters" come from Shakespeare; many, but not all, are poetry, because poetry by its very nature has a high pleasure-to-word ratio.  But I like prose, too:  "Isn't it pretty to think so" (Hemingway), "and so we beat on, boats against the current . . . " (Fitzgerald), and bits of Joan Didion have taken up permanent residence in my head.


I think photography can be equally as compelling as words, but I'm still compiling my Greatest Hits in that category.  But sometimes I feel like I'm capturing words in an image, like this one that makes me think of Ezra Pound:

[Textures by Kim Klassen and Flypaper Textures]

 

I'm sure I will write more about words as time goes on, but for now I'd like to know -- if you love words, too, what floats through your head?  Where does it come from?