Frutkin - Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

The alphabet is a profoundly adaptable and fecund system.What tales can be told from the assembling and orchestrationof twenty-six letters and a space!

The letter A was originally drawn as an ox-head (Proto-Sinaitic pictograph, 1500 B. C.). Turn the capital letter A overand one sees the prongs of the oxs horns. How it evolved(literally turned) from a pictograph of an ox-head to an A isa development that can be followed in the evolution of Proto-Canaanite script.

In its etymological sources, the word ox suggests fertility. Itderives from the Sanskrit uksati, he emits semen. The Indo-European root is ugw, to make wet.

Turn the ox horns upside down and one sees a rudimentaryplow. At the end of nomadic cultures in the Near East, with thefounding of cities and the beginnings of agriculture andwritten language, it is fitting that the alphabet had an oxleading the way.

(A further connection between language and bovines: theearliest Chinese writing is found on oracle bones, the shoulderblades of cattle. The bones were poked with hot branding ironsand the ensuing cracks read for prophecies which were thenengraved on the shoulder blades in the form of early Chinesepictographs.)

The connections between the ox and written language appearagain in the form of Greek writing called boustrophedon (bous= ox) in which the line moves left to right and then right to lefton the succeeding line, going down the page as a farmer wouldplough a field.

The etymological connections grow ever more intriguing whenone considers that one of the sources of the word verse is theMiddle Latin versus, a furrow. This conjures the image of aploughed field that resembles a poem on the page, and vice-versa.

We glimpse letters everywhere: the H in the ladder and thefence, the S-bend in river and road, the alphabet on thetelephone keypad, in the tangled garden, in the limbs of bodieswalking the crowded street. The taps pour out letters infoaming chaos, so too do letters fly from the banner whippingin the wind. The Tibetans believe prayer flags, when flutteringin the breeze, release over and over the prayers printed on them.Cars and buses release sounds that represent alphabeticnonsense. Every mouth has a balloon attached, a bubble filledwith words. Another balloon stretches and swells inside ourheads. The three electric wires passing over my back yard are alined page waiting to be filled in. The city is a kind of text,Borges infinite library broken free of restraint and gone mad,as if the letters and words have been liberated and comepouring out of the neo-classical building like inmates releasedfrom an asylum. The letters are a kind of god: ubiquitous andomnipresent. Like a primal foundational energy, theymagnetize themselves, gather, cluster, resonate, creating anongoing story of infinite complexity.