The most powerful symbols we possess are our letters. For a name to exist, including yours, it must have a sound, or a graphic depiction. Our alphabet contains 26 phonetic-letter-glyphs, these glyphs have built our world: everything that you know and all knowledge leans on them. The great magician Alan Moore says: "Two dozen phonetic glyphs, they are the titans on whose shoulders the entire Earth is resting. Alive as abstract animals, they animate us, galvanise our inert culture with sublime significance.”
Letters offer us a field of endless exposition and we are all hypnotised; we have all been spelt.
There is an old Icelandic magical idea: it is that the shape of the letters (runes, staves, lines) that carry the "primary agency." Therefore, combining rune-stave-lines-shapes, the magician can perceive new views, new feelings and new worlds.
Drawing from practices, runes, alphabets, signs, and symbols. I am offering a two-hour intensive course on how we can become post-literate. To use our hands to conduct new lines and shapes, expressing our emotions in lettered shapes found in streets, trees, feathers, rocks, furs, snail trails, or ripples of water. To become founders of new alphabets, and play with whim, explorations, spell-metres, new hidden passes and obscurities. To free a magical language from the landscape and from within us - to retrieve new hieroglyphs. When we read the lines of the leaves, the Earth's language becomes mysterious. We are so familiar with the words on the page that we have lost the ability to look at it in its full strangeness.
And yes, what can a post-literate expression look like? And what consequences can it have on our thinking? To step outside of the spelt and lettered to communicate a writing of cognitive dissonance instead of neat "explanations"?
We will journey into the language of something greater: we will enter into the provocation of new thought.
I love this inquiry Andreas, was watching The Cave of Bones last night...in it is the idea of hashtags in stone...engravings in stone by Homo Maledi and Homo Neanderthalensis rather like the stone tongue (silicon) of the internet and how search engines work. Confluence and influence...troll tongued and stumblefooted myths converge. Very interested in your course have signed up though it will be 1am for me in West Australia. Thank you for these most generous offerings which I find inspirational. There is a sense of kenning in the way you write...a blood and bone singing that speaks to an intestinal ontology.