Words Are Shells ∬
...and other stolen words.
These are stolen words, stolen symbols, stolen meanings.
It is easier to speak with the words of others than with the words you have not yet thought of.
I could get a pen and start writing a new language. It would follow some forms my hand already knows: maybe English, or maybe Japanese, or maybe Arabic.
Is English my language any more than the others aren’t? Whatever I draw, I could say it is an M, I could say it is an O, it is only a shell for my meaning.
A few of the characters illustrated above survived until well into the 1800s.
Some of the others in this image are not so familiar. ♣
Lacan...insist[s] that the imaginary aspect of language is meaning: there is no doubt that meaning is by nature imaginary. Meaning is, like the imaginary, always in the end evanescent, for it is tightly bound to what interests you, that is, to that which you are ensnared. ♢
Far Future Expires ∬
Freely drawing figures, you catch one or two and impose yourself on it. It doesn’t have a name yet.
Someone once said that if you wrote for long enough eventually you’d write Shakespeare. I might be wrong, my memory may be letting me down but muscles never forget.
You’re drawing without intention and suddenly you see a familiar figure. Your hand knows where to go even if your mind doesn’t. Maybe they used to mean something. Or maybe they will tomorrow.
Well Sum Of ∬
You borrow, you adopt, you adapt. It makes perfect sense if you know what sense you’re making.
To make new meaning you can take from somewhere else.
Possibly rendering them both useless.
I will say I have not read Lacan and others say it is notoriously difficult.
If you don’t know what it means, can it still be read?
This matheme is a symbolic representation of Lacan's ideas but the symbols are borrowed from languages that already exist. Ones that already have their meaning.
By bringing mathematics and literature together, Lacan makes the matheme illegible in either.♢
AD333 ∬
Language is both colonizer and colonized. ❎
English, the great borrower, developed in the 11th century using parts of the Latin and Runic alphabet, making sense to a small few.
ᛝ ᛞ ᛟ ᛠ ᛒ ᛊ ᛩ ᛯ ᚺ ᚨ ᛯ
The genesis of English was only legible to a small group, but inversely the conquering languages of French and Latin were not read by true English speakers. Even with various conquests there still remained an exclusivity of language: a language for the plebs (English), a language for the pious (Latin), a language for the privileged (French). ☙
Red Curves ∬
...put the fire of scripture into the language of ploughboys. ☙
This was a deliberate act to keep the working class in their place. One of the first English Bibles was printed by William Tyndale and subsequently all copies were bought and then burned upon Henry VIII’s request. It would have been shameful for a holy language to be spoken by those who toiled the soil. ☙
And The Eyes Have It ∬
Man who made The Man cannot become The Man.
Then the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the sons of men were building. And the Lord said, “If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” ◬
The story goes that God created language to disrupt human kind. Trying to reach perfection (heaven), man built a tower. The symbol of perfection (God) destroyed the attempts of the imperfect beings to achieve a higher status.
Complex Square ∬
Man, who made The Man, now makes a machine.
What would Google do?
With all these different shapes floating around, attempts at unifying humanity again seem, so far, unsuccessful.
Language is a puzzle and the nuances of the imperfect beings confound the new capital G.
⌾
Encoded Inhospitality ∬
Do you have the password?
Some written languages are born with the intention of accessibility. Latin was a language whose form was flowing so as to be easily written and disseminated. ☙
Some forms are made only to be written by a select few.
Metal produces signs that are
not meant to appeal to the masses
The illegible logo functions as a password; it is a boundary, behind which the secret begins. ℭ ☗
The illegible black metal logo developed, to some extent, analogously with typographic forms of encryption and secrecy developed for the Internet, such as the so-called CAPTCHA—Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. ℭ
The digital password must be a collection of symbols, numbers and letters defying any formalities of grammar and logic. I take an asterix, I take an ampersand, some numbers designating my birth to make this mélange of forms more meaningful.
Satisfy.net ∬
Cacography: Scribbles keep secrets.
We must constantly create puzzles to keep us on the edge of legibility. Where once we tried to reach perfection we must now use our imperfection to hide.
Scribbling all over the page. As if the page were a metre wide. Each word as wide.
Some of it spews onto other pages.
She’s writing and writing and letters are piled up everywhere.
And she’s sweating.
Cigarette, cigarette.
And then the letters get folded, put in an envelope, licked and put in a drawer. ⏭
Written but not read. Written but not pronounced.
She ends with,
“...n’existe pas!” ⏭
Index of symbols
♣
Cornwall Online Parish Clerks
Learning to write the alphabet" by Heather Wolfe
∬
Conversations with Kiah Reading or working titles
♢
Letters from Lacan
Douglas Sadoa Aoki
Paragraph, Vol. 29, No. 3 (November 2006), pp. 1-20
◬
Bible
Genesis 11:6, Tower of Babel
❎
Can Words “Bounce”? A Complicated Resilience on Vancouver Island
Casey Beal MOMUS review February 22, 2019
☙
The Adventure of English
Melvyn Bragg
2003
⌾
Google’s live translation of Korean handwritten text
ℭ
Crypto Logo Jihad. Black Metal and the Aesthetics of Evil
Daniel van der Velden
Art Papers November/December, 2007
☗
Borknagar is a progressive black metal band from Bergen, Norway,
⏭
Malina
1991
Director: Werner Schroeter
Story by: Ingeborg Bachmann