Woke up at 6.30am and couldn’t back to sleep so I had an early start and headed out to the library again. This time however, I took my trusty manual Pentax instead of my digital camera, as I have brought a load of slide film with me and it’s about time I started using it. After a long session at the library, I had an even loooonger session of trying to get out my thoughts as images.
Libraries are necessarily quiet places, but as I sat there today I imagined I could hear what the books wanted to tell me. It was a cacophony of thoughts, ideas, schemes, dreams, plans, propositions, strategies, policies and speculations – I was torturing myself really, as it is such a strange feeling to be surrounded by so much knowledge, yet not to be able to understand any of it. I looked and I saw, but I could not read much.
This unnerving sensation was heightened because I was going over notes I had taken on “Linear A”, an un-deciphered writing system that was used on ancient Crete circa 1800 – 1450 BCE. It contains hundreds of symbols whose meaning remains a mystery. There have been several theories put forward about how this language might have worked, but ignorance prevails. We simply have no idea what they were saying, which is simultaneously frustrating and pleasing, much like my library experiences here.
