Nov 15 2009
A Picture Of My Mother’s Death, In Words
Long-time readers will know that I’m a fan of Wordle, the web site that let’s you make word clouds of strings of text. I have a lot of them1 because they present words outside the context of narrative, which is both disjointed and jarring, while at the same time being fascinating and beautiful. I decided to make a couple based on the writings I did during my Grief series to see how they would look.
There’s nothing really to describe, these graphic visualizations are up to the interpretation of the viewer. The words are places randomly and the size of the words is a function of their frequency of use, so there’s much left up to the viewer to decide upon.
The first is a word cloud of the entire series of posts. The second is a word cloud of just the final poem “Sunday.” The final one is the most poignant for me, since the word “space” appears more prominent than even “grief.” It’s interesting that both of these words and it was space away from my mother that I sought more than anything when she was still alive, and space within grief that allowed me to realize what was lost when she died.
- although you wouldn’t know it, since the recent destruction of my blog server screwed up all of my images links [↩]
