Ruminations

The Black Dog

Black Dog

It isn’t sudden or violent. The Black Dog.

It comes and you don’t notice it. It lays down at the very peripheral of your vision.

It waits until you are used to it in that spot and it moves – just a bit – closer. Before you know it, you are stepping around it, stepping over it.

Then it gets larger. And larger.

And it comes to sit next to you. And you’re strangely comforted by it.

And then it is in your lap. And then on your chest.

Someone may come by and remark upon it, upon the need to make it go away. They shoo at it. But it just regards them with no expression.

And your eyes look the same when you wonder why they bother. Because it is so troublesome to bother about things.

 

Chestnuts are growing

Do what you will, Winter comes

The Black Dog brings it

 

 

Image: By Aura2 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

About Words

“For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.”

– Jeannette Winterson