Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Naomi pointed me to this passage in Doris Lessing's novel (my emphasis):

"During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I've had these moments of 'knowing' one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die. Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, its not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle, perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won't." (549)

Although Lessing didn't actually employ typo/graphic elements to fill the descriptive void, it is an interesting recognition of words failing to describe 'real experience'. The potential for an image, or the combination of word and image, to convey something immediate, ephemeral and emotive is an idea I've been carrying around from the beginning on this research. There is something about what is not said that makes the experience more real (and more subjective?)