The alphabet and its letters give us imagery early in our lives to which we learn to see the world around us. But we often forget that it's the power of the letters themselves, their physical "graphical lines and element" that offer the incendiary spark of image making. The letter is the PRIMAL thing, the first and what is revealed after comes second. The lettered word, like a biological organ, is the first tool of our perceptions. The alphabet is truly made up of 26 Gods. These Gods occupy every holy sutra and book - they are the creators of our civilisation.
With this idea, I am suggesting another way of working with letters, a more subversive way, where letters are revealed coming from other writers than just human pens and keyboards. If we are looking for new Gods, we need new letters.
I have written here a short poem from the graphic lines that we find in the cracks on pavements. It's an immense alphabet spanning all over the world as there is a crack on every street. What I love about this alphabet is that it reveals how the Earth is pushing and surging upwards from underneath our human made roads and tarmacs, she writes as she resists. This poem is meant to be read just in the same way as you are reading this post, from left to right. These are the Earth's living written forms.
It is an attempt to create a post-literate graphical texture and "a surrealism of the written word." To make it post-literate means we have to be ready to answer the question: can nature also transcribe its own "thoughts" through writing? Can the spots of the leopard be an entire new Latin waiting to be discovered and does it have its own grammatical rules? The runes at the back of the tortoise shell, can they whisper to us another perception which may offer us a new understanding of the world? Or another way of putting it - how can those marks be anything else but a language?
What would it take to become post-literate and engage with the presumed illegible shapes and lines of the world to create new forms? How do we become literate in reading tortoise shells or the leaves of the Elm tree, all to create meaning, especially poetic meaning and depth? This exploration can reveal that there is a poetic significance in all of nature's motions and forms, often a wyrd too vast to understand. But I believe post-literalism can offer a chance to resist the insistence of human centredness that believes in its own letters and shapes as the - only - legitimate custodian in which to claim meaning.