When the words stop
Continuing my weekend at the cinema, today I resisted the temptation to sit through three hours of elves, hobbits, creatures with funny names and all that malarkey, and instead went to see Iris. Based on memoirs by her husband John Bayley, the film looks at the author Iris Murdoch’s final years as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s, but also incorporates flashbacks to Oxford in the 1950s and the beginning of her relationship with Bayley. As I pointed out yesterday when discussing Harry Potter, I’m lousy at reviewing films, so all I’ll say is that it was absolutely brilliant — although I suspect not to everyone’s tastes (very British, not exactly cheerful, and with the full contingent of luvvies on parade yet again).
As the first signs of Alzheimer’s begin to reveal themselves, Iris wonders: “If you live mostly within your own mind, how can you tell if you’re going mad?” It’s shocking to see the loss of her remarkable power for words and writing — and I say that as someone who has never read one of Murdoch’s novels. My experience of writing is completely different, of course — a world away from ever being published or read by more than a handful of people. Yet I also love words, love writing and love putting the right words together in an attempt to make them come alive. Even if this passion never takes me any further than the inane streams of consciousness (plus the occasional insight) on this site, I truly hope that I never lose the power to write. Almost anything else can happen, but as long as I am able to communicate using the written word, I will be content. As ridiculous as it may seem, words are that important to me.
Aside: The irony is, of course, that I have just read the above paragraphs again, and realised that they contain some embarrassingly clumsy writing and far too much repetition of certain words. Indeed, “words” is one of the — er, um — words that I seem unable to stop using. I bet Iris Murdoch never had such problems. Sigh.