Somewhere in the dog sweating days of this
year’s glorious summer, I sat in the garden of a friend of mine and I told her
I was looking for letters. Explaining myself, as is my nature, I specified by
telling I was looking for letter-shaped
objects on the streets. I took from my pocket an A I had found coming over,
a little white plastic lid of a carton of chocolate milk. These were the things
I was after: discarded pieces… filth, garbage, the waste of a depraved society of
people wearing diner jackets and polishing their glasses as their ships went
down… This was exhibit A in the Case Against Humanity… to unmask the myth of
people’s good nature, evidence for our wastefulness and laziness and to scratch
off some of the gilded veneer from the repulsive hypocrite monster.
However, that aspect was just a side attraction these letters had for me. The main
part for me was the fact that they were not designed
to be letters. The design factor, that base human idea of Purpose, the conformist approval. If I
could escape that whole industry – I could escape society! – with using letters
not made by man; not made as letters. It was I who made them into letters; or
fate, which was even better… I felt I could reach into the bosom of the Gods by
escaping designers, the hollow, hellish world of advertisement and fashionableness…
Ha! to take a leap into the void, the future, or sideways into a parallel
universe, past everything and everybody, riding dragons and eating deep-fried pixie
dust… that was all represented by my letters. From the filth, unto the
splendour of pure lyric; untainted, unrepresenting, unrepresentative language…
off the grid, into nirvana.
With letters like these, I could write not
only in words and sentences of my own, but with actual letters of my own, letters of Chance… and Nature! I envisioned
entire volumes of raw romantic poetry where the powers of the rotting words
would be emphasized by the re-born letters from the gutter… Perhaps new letters
were not enough and a new language was necessary to reach that longed-for state
of freedom… but wouldn’t that radically destroy the meaning of writing in
itself?
For months, I searched the streets, in my
own town and abroad. On the piss-stained cobblestones of Amsterdam as well under
the purple shadows from the towers thrown on the square in front of the Papal Palace
in Avignon and on the gum sticky Angel’s Promenade of Nice. I showed my project
to few people wanting to have it all ready to be put into action when I would
choose to reveal this bum alphabet or
beachcomber’s font or whatever great title I would come up with in the end… And
I wasn’t sure how to use them: make photographs and then collages of those
photographs to form words? Or was it even possible to find some digital genius,
some miracle software Merlin, to come work with me on this and make an actual font out of it, binarily
vectorized and fluid… to fight the monster from within, and mock designers from
the Olympus, doing a naked dance and shouting whee-hee! I wasn’t sure. And I’m
still not sure. This is – as most of what I do – a work in progress, unlikely ever
to be finished. I have a shoe box full of letters but not even all the letters
of the Western European alphabet, still missing the H and the F. We keep
looking…
The only reason I’m telling you all this is
because yesterday, that same friend of the beginning came by my house to stuff
a birthday present into my letterbox: a children’s set of stamps of letters. How
good of her! And how perfect was the present! She had presented me with an
entirely different and equally valuable way of forming own words
outside the pre-described ways… yes! To write with children’s letters, all
stamped from a mirror image, as the old lead letters used to print important
books with on hand-made linen pages. It is perfect: I will soon have not one
but two parallel universes to write in, one with the smooth and sin-free letters
of the child, and the other the scummy, dirty, Mr Hyde bum letters. I stamped
some words on the inside of a pizza box last night… and was thrilled. An
underwater world of flying pirates, to sing a black hat blues and play the
organ of the submarine in my underwear.
