A new alphabet

In a recent interview, David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, said this about the alphabet:

…I’m not trying to demonize the alphabet at all. I don’t think the alphabet is bad. What I’m trying to get people to realize is that it’s a very intense form of magic. …I mean, it’s not by coincidence that the word “spell” has this double meaning—to arrange the letters in the right order to form a word, or to cast a magic. To spell a word, or to cast a magic spell. These two meanings were originally one and the same. In order to use this new technology, this new play of written shapes on the page, to learn to write and to read with the alphabet, was actually to learn a new form of magic, to excercise a new form of power in the world.

…Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see vision and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!

It’s outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it’s animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

David Abram

Understanding our animistic past has always been of interest to me. Reading David’s description that our animistic connection can still be accessed via the alphabet is fascinating.

Ten years ago I wrote in a monograph about my work:

Earth Link benches serve as a kind of Rosetta stone deciphering the forgotten past and reforging old links between culture and Nature; between its diverse peoples and the world they exist in. …With a sculptor’s alphabet of sticks and stones, I hope to give shape to this felt connection.

Ever since moving to Windgrove I have endeavoured to see and hear the language of the trees and stones, birds and sky. Perhaps, by listening long enough, I might someday sculpt something worthy of its subject matter. Whether or not a boy from Detroit can become proficient in this in the way a Hopi or Lakota elder is proficient, remains to be seen. But, it’s been great fun trying.

Now, a new twist has been added to this quest. Knowing that I will be going to China later in the year (finances permitting), I have been seriously studying the Chinese language. The dining table is strewn with learning materials and my head is swimming with new sounds and enigmatic swirls of pictographic symbols.

When I look through the trees to the sea beyond, the abstract markings of the darkened branches seem not unlike the cursive markings of the Chinese characters I am studying.

Should the branches start spelling out fu, shung, qu, guo, jiao, xiang or xian and truly begin speaking to me, I’ll celebrate quietly with a bottle of champagne (before checking myself into the nearest hospital).