“Primary experiences describe the general shape of not zooming into a fractal, but rather, zooming out of a fractal, with original experiences feeling more distant, yet ever layered into the wider and wider experiences which come.” -Christopher Vita

If experience is like zooming out from a fractal, then perhaps any body of knowledge offers a similar gathering momentum. It begins at the limbs with the collection of small bits of information. Those bits gather into larger and more solid structure.

What are your ideas about the alphabet? Have you created one of your own? Please write a post and mention it.

With the weather getting colder, I’ve been taking my daughters to parks a lot less. Recently, as an after-school activity, I talked with my daughters about the alphabet, how each character makes a unique sound, and what can happen to the integrity of letters when they are re-copied or mis-recalled. I talked about how strong, memorable, and unique letters must be, and how concerns like that might shape an alphabet so that certain shapes endure. I asked them if they wanted to make their own alphabets. My younger daughter drew letters that closely represented our own Roman alphabet, with a few extra flourishes and tails. My older daughter drew a set of unique doodles, but when I took the sheet away and asked if she could repeat any of them, she couldn’t. They might be too young for this question.

But I found myself carried away. I took out ink and brush and with images of the 26 letters in my head, lowercase and uppercase, I responded to each as if I were asking questions of them: “Isn’t this your essence?” or, “Don’t you mean this?” or, “Wouldn’t this be more precise?” or, “Wouldn’t you rather this?”. And then, after that, I began to ask, “How come you never thought of this?”

The pencil drawings belong to my 9-year-old.

Those are arrogant questions for someone who has so little background in the history and evolution of the three-thousand year-old alphabet (if tracing to Greek, the first true alphabet). And yet, the energy I brought to those questions goes back to my earliest memories, as a toddler, being puzzled by the forms as I saw them around me and held brightly colored magnetic pieces in my hands. These same characters are next to my laptop now as I type. I thought they looked strange and… well… not quite right. Although I thought making words was magical, I mistrusted the letters more than I’m sure they deserve. In fact, I’ve known many people, my own mother included, who adore the alphabet and trust it implicitly. If there is an essence to be revealed there, an Aleph, but we each take our own course, and I might only be able to see its beauty by rebelling first.

I spent an unrestrained hour in a feverish flourish, as my daughters became bored and wandered on to other paintings. In that time I made 78 forms and filled a scroll of rice  paper. I thought each letter I’d made was unique until I cut the sheets and laid them out on the carpet. As I rotated and flipped sheets over backwards, I realized that I had drawn many of the forms several times, as horizontal or vertical mirrors. In fact, I’d drawn one “letter” seven times, in different orientations. Every character I drew had a single stroke, except for one. A few letters had kinks.

The result of this simple reduction was an alphabet with 34 characters. I stacked the sheets and laid them out in a sequence that seemed to reveal the evolution of the forms. It was an easy and natural exercise, with few incongruities, and took only ten minutes to complete. However, I had the feeling that the linearity was not necessary, and I felt that one particular letter was the central form from which all evolutions arose, as if my alphabet was, in fact, a cross or a star.

A day later, reflecting on the letter sketches, it might be that what has bothered me most, all these years, about the Roman alphabet is that letters are created with more than one stroke. What’s wrong with that? I’m not so sure I can say. But it has to do with reduction.

“X”, the only two-stroked character, is at the end of this alphabet, as if to say, “What’s next?”

I want to add certain letters, and remove some that look like duplicates (particularly, several letters are essentially the Greek alpha). But I will not to make any alterations until I’ve taken more time to reflect on what it is I might might truly be seeking, as the “ideal” alphabet.

Is this a common exercise for typography students? I didn’t find anything about it in a Google search. What alphabets have you created and what do they mean to you?

To see a slideshow of these forms, go to this page.

A Line to My Heart

Systole & Diastole

He was
dreaming
daydreaming
imagining something.

The winter sun beamed around his silhouette so I felt warmth there.
The summer breeze flowed around him and touched me where I waited.
Leaves and tree limbs quivered, making shaking shadows on the ground
and a second dappled layer of leafprints flickered on the screen, which
waved like the shimmering one imagines with the appearance of a fairy or an angel.
All the dancing resulted in a blaze-like enchantment for him and for me,
which was a meditation.

But I could never see his face from where I stood.

So I wonder,
Was he taking something in from the tree:
its silence, its peace?
Was he asking it a question:
aware that a tree knows things humans don’t?
Was he making a deal with it,
like a vulnerability:
honestly revealing a detail of the human condition for what it is?
Was he offering it something of himself
as encouragement that we humans too, have a little grasp of truth?

What was going on there, Dad?
And what really goes on, in our conversations with trees?

Jaume Plensa sculpture; Lake Drive, Milwaukee

I was five years old and I slid to the front seat of the car, looking up at the back-lit letters designating the drugstore into which my mom had stepped. I had spent a lot of time looking at letters: such beautiful things! I asked my dad, “Why do those letters up there look so happy: happy more than any letters anywhere? I’m trying to think how I could make them even happier, but they are perfect.” My dad looked from his Popular Mechanics before answering, “Because they want you to feel like going in. They want you to buy something.” I thought about all the happiest letters I knew: all names on storefronts and advertisements in the paper. I wondered if these letters would be devastated if no one bought something anymore. I felt a crushing, sympathetic sadness for the letters and their unfulfilled desire. At that age, I hid certain food labels –the logos themselves– from the trash because I thought they would be sad if I threw them in the garbage. I asked my dad, “Are there any happy letters that know how to be happy even if you don’t buy something from them?” I remember how my dad laughed ruefully to himself as he thought about that and answered, “No”.

That emotion my dad felt there was so resonating I began to almost hate letters then. Even last year when my five-year-old daughter, Autumn was learning words she said, “Mommy, I see a word: Speedway”. I had not mentioned brand names with my children (I used my own names instead, without really thinking about it, because the real names seemed such a loss of innocence). So for my daughters, reading these brand names was a new discovery. I heard myself responding to my five-year-old that morning, “Be careful now that you can read. Words, especially words on signs, are always trying to make you do what they want you to do.”

David Abram draws attention to the beauty of the letter by revealing its historical power. He seems to find a way to be close to nature without losing his love for letters. But I responded most to his ambivalence: an alphabetic culture has sublimated the love of nature over into the love of letters by looking from the tree down into the book. So, Abram reminds us, there is necessarily a loss of adoration for and involvement in the natural world as a consequence of the abstract letter form which, unlike kanji, doesn’t even reference nature.

What I feel now is, that’s not the whole truth. We know ourselves to be humans living in a culturally pluralistic way, with a long-ranging historical perspective. We see how, over time, humans have imbued almost every available item with power. So we can now begin with more awareness to choose for ourselves our own gods, which symbols are the best, and where to place our worship. It’s not the detached worship of an Enlightenment philosopher seeking objective truth, but the real worship of an Ecstatic who is not a slave to objects and who knows the individual’s proper place in the pantheon.

The beauty in the word is something I am only beginning to see again. I now engage almost as if in conversation with letters and words: I relate and interact to the intention there, rather than observe and walk away. And I’m now in the search for Borges’ Aleph: that central holding place for everything in the universe.

Even the physics we learn in school tells us there’s something very special and elusive about how light works in the real world: it’s a particle and a wave. Nothing else can claim both properties. In art class we learn about the flow of light over objects: core shadow, cast shadow, reflected light, highlight. Light on all materials, whether it is a snowball or a cell, a finger or a blood vessel, can be related to the behavior of light wrapping itself around the basic geometric forms: a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, and a cone.

How lovely it is, that flow of light. An artist’s world begins at that door. But not for me. I didn’t even begin to explore these simple questions about light until I was a graduate student. And then, I was concerned with other great questions: understanding the science and medicine within, mastering composition, exploring the great masters of illustration, mixing color, learning the technology.

What pushed me to an exploration of light at the layers beneath? Spiritual questions, it seems. As a child, my world had been a rational one. Things made sense that way. Then, I discovered the irrational world where emotions and other “out of the ratio” behaviors made sense. My model of a world divided between rationality and irrationality worked well and still does, but there was something shining through, disturbing the sharply defined territories there, and that breach can only be analogized to the behavior of light itself. Perhaps I’ll one day find a good way of explaining this experience. I brought out my camera again to help me ask questions about how light behaves. Taking photos, I was learning deeper answers in the presence of light there: we can do more than reflect light or transmit light, we can ourselves be light.

While a photographer has the magical eye to capture the secrets of light and freeze them for all to learn by, an artist can move one step beyond. Interpret that behavior for me. What does it mean that light passing through a leaf offers the serenity of a stained glass window? How can the golden light reflecting off that icy lake tell me about where to pour my energies in my everyday life? An artist is able to ask these questions. I am finally ready, myself, to begin asking these questions professionally and personally.

© 2011 Laura Maaske, Medimagery LLC

What have you learned about light: light as a natural phenomenon; light in art; light as the spiritual metaphor?

Anatomy of Wood

Featured woodturning artist: Harold Solberg

“There’ll never be a door. You are inside
and the fortress contains the universe
and has no other side nor any back
nor any outer wall nor secret core.
Do not expect the rigor of your path,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
which stubbornly splits into another one,
to have an end. . . .“
.       .-from Jorge Luis Borges‘ “The Labyrinth”. The Sonnets: In Praise of Darkness. Penguin Classics; 2010

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I’ve not made a thorough study of Borges’ Works, nor his Biography. I have, however, enjoyed many of his writings recently.

The door as an abstract form is a transition point: any opening to a new world where rules and scenery change. A door is an opportunity. Perhaps you live in a Seeall world where doors and windows come like a waterfall at warp speed. For me, in a simpler world, I feel lucky to know a true portal when I see one. Borges’ works overflow with references to discrete places that have sharp borders and infinite depth: a rose, the moon, a labyrinth. It seems to me in his world that doors fell on a hopeless, repeating, circular map. I sympathize with a difficult choice, and admire the playfulness and wisdom of asking questions about doors. But I would ask him, if I’d had the chance to speak with him, if he had turned down some door in youth that became his ever-after tormentor. Each true opportunity –each storm– fully engaged, never repeats.

Borges revealed that (depending on the rhythm of one’s own inner map) a critical but unattended-to door may present itself in a thousand different forms. It can do so unrelentingly –think about a time in your life of a recurring dream– because it is the only next step available on one’s path. Or, at the other terrifying extreme, Borges also imagined a world that was door-less. Both extremes –an infinitely repeating circle of doors or no doors– offered worlds with no way out. There must have been some small beauty gained at the place of turning away from a door (like the lovely contemplation of its potential), and perhaps Borges knew about that himself, but I cannot find it in his works. Can you? Borges said, the word that cannot-be-spoken is the most important word in any story. Did he ever write a story or poem about a door that had the capacity to be opened?

Turning to another poet who understood a door, Rumi ingeniously proposed that, in the act of longing itself we are at our closest to touching God. This sentiment seems opposite to Borges’ explorations, and might, itself, have solved Borges’ problem. Without longing, a door has no permission to appear. My first longing, as a toddler, opened my first door. That was my first abstracted concept of “path”, and it arrived as a dream-like visualization of a door filled hallway. It happened upon my mother’s offering of the word, “someday” in answer to my now-forgotten request for some desired activity or object. I asked, “When is someday?” I thought it might be Sunday. I recall the answer was not fully understandable to me. But her explanation, now also lost in time, must have been a wise one to evoke in my mind’s eye a door.

“A clear head at the center changes everything
There are no edges to my loving now.
You’ve heard it said there’s a window.
that opens from one mind to another,
but if there’s no wall there’s no need,
for fitting the window or the latch “
.       .-from Rumi, “Sudden Wholeness”, The Book of Love; Transl. Coleman Barks; Harper; 2003

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What does the concept of “door” mean to you? Do you agree with Borges that there is no real door?