I say I had them: that is, they appeared or were manifested. I didn't consciously strive to associate images with words - it either happened independently of the thought processes I could control, or I was born with the associations hardwired, as it were.
I sometimes wonder where they were derived from, and what significance the images representing the concept had.
There used to be a greater stock of images-representing-things in my growing mind, but the store has depleted over the years, and now I can remember only a few. Of those few, here is a non-exhaustive list:
Saturday: a series of striated shalllow hills or what looked like a long sleeping beast with one leg pushed forward, shrouded in mist to give a blue tinge to proceedings.
Friday: a statue made out of animal bone; the extremities of the structure tipped with brown. At other times, I might have considered that it was not a statue but a tree. It just hung there, naked in the void, and no light glistened off its edges.
Brother: two small dolls with wiry black hair, looked at from above. Were they made from wood? Both wore blue jackets.
I possessed internal images for every day of the week, for whole numbers, for family members, for a limited spectrum of thoughts and emotions. Gradually, their presence dwindled as I got to the age of about nine or ten. They were useless, anyway, for represented a word and only a word. They never changed, I couldn't multiply or divide them, and nor could I rotate them or zoom in and out of them in my mind.
For all that they were, somehow, the definition of my childhood. They endured more than any particular emotion or concept, these static little pictures, and were more real than a dream. I'd like to know why Saturday was striated hills, or Thursday a plough in the fog, or Tuesday a toffee-coloured lollipop. Can someone out there explain?
