The Bum Alphabet

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.