10
Into the New Millennium
Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter.
Shakespeare (King Lear)
The arbitrariness of language and of letters is a hallmark of twentieth-century thinking and has been summed up most powerfully in Ferdinand de Saussure’s teachings early in the twentieth century on the linguistic signifier. As Saussure and his followers (of which we are all descendants) have shown, the relationship between the linguistic sign, whether oral or written, and what it signifies is purely a matter of social convention. Not that this view is entirely new in the twentieth century. In the late eighteenth century, Charles de Brosses considered the view that language was conventional and arbitrary already to be the dominant one.
We have seen, nevertheless, over the course of the preceding chapters that there has also been a recurrent tendency in Western culture to see letters as “motivated,” that is, as maintaining or reflecting some sort of organic or analogical relationship to the things of our world. Indeed, it is due to this view, sometimes only in a diluted, residual form, that the alphabet has repeatedly provided a lens through which Western culture has viewed and assessed both itself and the world. In its strong form, this conception sees the alphabetic letter as actually containing some portion of the real world. This is the view espoused by Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of the same name, and it was inherent in many aspects of the ancient Greek and Roman conception of alphabetic letters: letters were the stoicheia or elementa and hence the very building blocks of the cosmos. While Socrates largely rejects Cratylus’s position, even he, in Plato’s dialogue, considers that there is carry-over, albeit imperfect and incomplete, from the real world into some letters, as for example, the trilled Greek letter “ρ” (“rho”) which, for Socrates, does not just convey motion but actually is motion (represented also by the movement of the tongue in trilling), for which reason the “rho” is used, he says, in words referring to movement.
Although a consistently “strong” view of motivation has been largely set aside, beginning with Plato’s Socrates, it has made periodic returns in later centuries, as we have noted during the course of this book. Certainly the analogy between the alphabet and the world has had great frequency, especially in what we can think of as a “weak” version of the motivated letter. In this view, letters do not necessarily contain actual bits of the world, but they are seen as representing the world in terms of their oral form (their names or pronunciation) or their written shapes. On the one hand, such a view is justified historically, given that the first Phoenician letters were in fact pictograms that lost, quite early, their visually mimetic aspects. However, even long after the loss of any sort of visual representation, the weak view of motivation has remained. To an extent, we are all subject to this view. Our various responses to changes in orthography – for example, our very different attitudes towards “c” and “k” and even “q” when they represent the same sounds – attest to a difficulty in viewing the letter as an entirely arbitrary signifier. “Amerika” strikes us as vaguely militaristic in a way that “America” does not, largely because the “k” is far more frequent in German than in English, and Germany has been seen as responsible for two world wars in the twentieth century. Surely that is a lot to load onto a single letter! Furthermore, a few letters of the alphabet are seen as a bit strange or exotic – “x” above all, but also “z” – largely due to their infrequency. If all letters are completely arbitrary as signifiers, we should not think of some as being more “natural” in a particular language than others. “A” and “e” are so ubiquitous in many western European languages, including English, that it seems an extraordinary feat to write a lipogrammic novel with no “e”s whatsoever, as George Perec did in La Disparition (A Void). For all we know, there may be many novels without a single “z” or “j,” since both are infrequent, but no one has bothered to check to make sure. In any event, a lipogrammic novel that lacked a “z” would hardly strike us as remarkable.
In various ways, then, we reinstate a mild or “weak” view of letters as motivated on many occasions. Christian culture, in viewing its Saviour as the complete alphabet (“I am the Alpha and the Omega”), invokes the alphabetic order as a template that can be laid over the whole of the cosmos. In our time, most Christians probably do not reflect consciously on the fact that their religion views the alphabet as a compendium that expresses and is expressed by the actual order of the letters (A, B, C …). By contrast, in the Middle Ages people were far more aware of this analogy, as we have seen. In illuminations the “t” was often turned into a cross on which Christ’s crucifixion was depicted, especially for the opening of the Canon of the Mass that begins “Te Igitur, clementissime Pater.” Both the Drogo Sacramentary (850–5 CE) and the Sacramentary of Metz (ca. 870 CE) make use of this iconography; in the former various scenes of prefigured sacrifices inhabit an enormous “T” and in the latter Christ himself is emblazoned on the large letter (fig. 44).1
In its weak form, the “motivated” approach still subtends the Christian view of things, even in the modern world. The alphabetic order of the Messiah can be taken as shorthand for the notion that he rules and orders the whole cosmos. Certain letters of the alphabet also stand out, largely for their form. To this day, the “x” and the “t” can be seen as images of the Cross. One can ward off evil by making an “x” (or a “t”) with one’s fingers. A “p” or an “o” would not have the same effect. The degree to which people currently believe that making the shape of the letter has actual power may not be great, but the gesture has remained nevertheless. Since the two letters reproduce grosso modo the shape of the Cross, the gesture inevitably alludes to the possibility of salvation and redemption through divinely instituted letters.
The weak form of motivated letters also reasserts itself in many ABC books for children. Along with the ones that catalogue the names of animals in alphabetical order are ABC books that provide a list of moral values or good conduct. Similarly, there are many “city alphabet” books for children in which an “ABC of Toronto” or the “Chicago Alphabet” provides cityscape examples that form the letters; such books are designed to foster civic pride and aid in the socialization of a young person.
Because alphabetic letters have both a graphic form and an oral pronunciation, either aspect can become the source for “motivation.” Indeed, for a few letters their placement in the order of the alphabet can also become part of their “meaning,” as with the alpha and omega in Greek or the “A to Z” expression to suggest completion of a whole range. The shape of an “o” as well as the articulation (“oh”) suggests meanings in numerous languages. Moreover, the successive ideologies of different historical periods can establish new analogies between the letter and the world. As we saw in the chapter on the Renaissance, Geoffroy Tory abandoned the medieval Christianization of alphabetic letters but then remapped humanistic views onto their forms, seeing in the letters a human body and the Graeco-Roman tradition.
A few letters have been endowed with consistent meanings throughout much, even most, of the Western tradition. The most persistent of these is probably the “Y,” derived from the ancient Greek upsilon. Although in earlier chapters we have briefly seen some views of the letter, a more detailed consideration of the letter might be of value here as a final example. Indeed, the letter “Y” seems to encapsulate in little the thesis of this whole book; it can be seen as emblematic of the way in which Western culture returns again and again to the alphabet as a means of conceptualizing the world.
Very early on in Western culture, the form of the forked capital letter was metaphorized as a moral “fork in the road” such as every person encounters in life. The creation of the “Y” was attributed by classical, medieval, and Renaissance writers to the mathematician Pythagoras (sixth century BCE), and its origin ostensibly grew out of a tale told precisely of a fork in the road that Heracles (Hercules) encountered. In a sense, then, the legend, rather than simply metaphorizing the letter in terms of geography, made of the letter a representation of the geography of our world. Pythagoras supposedly created the letter in remembrance of the road. This tale seems to provide the background for an episode in Hesiod’s Works and Days (ca. 700 BCE) and is made explicit in Book II of Xenophon’s (430–354 BCE) Memorabilia (1965) in which Socrates retells Prodicus of Ceos’s anecdote about Heracles having to choose between two paths, the good and the bad, personified by two women.
Cicero (first century CE) alludes in his De Officiis (I.118) to Socrates’s narrative in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The key elements are by now well known: the path to the left is broad and has a sensual and comely woman who beckons to Hercules while the path to the right is narrow and has a beautiful, but more austere, woman. Hercules understands that the two paths represent, respectively, voluptas (pleasure) and virtus (virtue), and he chooses the correct path – that of virtue. Half a millennium later, Isidore of Seville makes the relationship between the alphabetic letter “Y” and the moral choices in life explicit. “Y litteram Pythagoras Samius ad exemplum vitae humanae primus formavit” (I.iii.7: Pythagoras of Samos first formed the letter Y as an example of human life). A bifurcation of the trunk takes place in adolescence (“ab adolescentia incipit”), the right branch being arduous but leading to a blessed life (“[ad] beatam vitam”), while the left is easier but it leads to disgrace and death.
This view of the road as a “Y” that presents one with two paths in life – or of the “Y” as representing that road – has had extraordinary currency throughout Western culture. This powerful metaphor subtends, for example, the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the narrator has veered from the “correct path” in life. It is found as well throughout the medieval romances in which knights are presented with two paths and must choose the proper one. In the thirteenth-century French Quest of the Holy Grail, one knight (Melian) at a fork in the road chooses the path that knights traditionally take and learns later that this denoted a moral failure because it represented the path of “terrestrial chivalry” not “celestial chivalry,” which was represented by the other branch of the “Y” (see de Looze, “Story” 130–1). Even the modern poem by Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken,” subtly reworks the metaphor of the forking road as referring to one’s choices in life:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
Took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
It is this last line of the well-loved poem that establishes the moral valence of the “Y” marked out on the earth.
While some of these instances do not specifically mention the letter “Y,” the instances that explicate the “Y” as representative of the moral choices on the road of life are so many that this view can be said never to be very distant. We cannot, of course, get all the way back to Pythagoras to verify that he first associated the fork in the road with the Greek upsilon, but the later tradition attributes this view to him, and by the Middle Ages it is a commonplace. Moreover, numerous medieval and Renaissance writers also attribute to Virgil a poem that explicates the “Y” in precisely these terms. The pseudo-Virgilian poem begins as follows:
Littera Pytagorae discrimine secta bicomi
Humanae vitae speciem praeferre videtur …
(Tory, Champ Fleury, fol. 62r)
(Pythagoras’s letter divided into two horns
Appears to signify the manner of human life …)
This poem may be as old as the sixth century CE. Certainly it is to be found in manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the poem, the pseudo-Virgil goes on to explain that the right side of the “Y” is narrow and more difficult to follow but leads eventually to repose and virtue whereas the left branch of pleasure is wider and easier but ends in misery.
By the Middle Ages this explication of “Y” is widely known, and it continues to be repeated in successive centuries. In his 1529 book on the alphabetic letter, Champ Fleury, Tory explicates what are for him the meanings of each letter of the alphabet. When he arrives at the “Y” he cites the same pseudo-Virgilian poem to which he adds an exhortation to youth, telling them not to ignore la conoissance des bonnes lettres qui sont le vrai bouclier pour surmonter adversite & tous vices, & pour paruenir a la souueraine felicite de ceste vie humaine, qui est parfaicte vertus (fol. 62v.)
(the knowledge of good letters which are the true shield in order to conquer adversity and all vices, and to arrive at the crowning happiness of this human life, which is perfect virtue.)
Tory then illustrates the “Y” twice, to which he attaches an explanation of the “sens moral de la lettre Pythagorique” (moral sense of the Pythagorian letter). The capital “Y” he presents has, as we would expect, a left branch that is thicker than the right one. From the left branch hang a number of objects, beginning with a sword and whip and ending with gallows and a fire to demonstrate that pleasure and worldly pursuits lead to “miserables maulx & griefz torments” (fol. 63r) (miserable evils and terrible torments). By contrast, the thinner branch on the right is harder to follow but finishes with a laurel wreath, palms, a scepter, and a crown.
Tory’s second illustration (fig. 45) is perhaps more striking for the way in which it associates the letter “Y” with a Dantean fork in the road. Taking this image from Fra Lucas Pacioli’s own treatise on the alphabetic letter, the Divina proportione (1509), Tory engraves a capital “Y” with detailed itineraries for both the left and right branches. The easy ascent of the wide left branch leads to food and wine, but then a fall into (eternal) flames; the right branch is much coarser and harder to climb, but leads to a throne over which a palm branch extends. Most interesting are the three beasts which one must get around on the right branch, which are labelled in ascending order: “libido,” “superbia,” “invidia.” Although the correspondence to the three beasts at the beginning of Dante’s Inferno is not exact, “libido” would seem to refer to the sins of incontinence in the Inferno, and while “superbia” or “pride” is not usually seen as a sin of violence (the second of Dante’s categories of sin) the second animal does appear to be a lion, which is of course the second animal that stands in Dante’s way in Inferno and which represents the sins of violence.
The moralized view of the “Y” continues well beyond the Renaissance period. We saw in an earlier chapter how children in the seventeenth century were taught to attribute moral values to each letter of the alphabet. The 1633 manual Methodes pour apprendre à lire, à écrire, à chanter le plein-chant et compter… (Methods for Learning to Read, Write, and Sing the Plainsong and Count …) displays on its title page the complete alphabet on two large stone-like tablets. In between the two halves of the alphabet is a large capital “Y,” and once again the left side is wide and smooth while the right side is narrow and coarse and crowned with a laurel wreath (fig. 46). There is no explication for the image, though the trunk leading up to the bifurcation is marked “CHOISYS” (CHOOSE). It is assumed that the viewer knows and understands the moral significance of the “Y” as representing the geography of our world and the choice of a life path.
The degree to which a moralizing view of the alphabet has permeated Western culture is evidenced by the fact that in many periods the “meaning” of a letter such as the “Y” needs no explanation whatsoever. It is seen as self-evident, as though the ideological dimension of the letter is simply part and parcel of what the letter most profoundly is. One finds this again in the great Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers, France, woven between about 1377 and 1382. This enormous tapestry comprising ninety different scenes from the biblical Apocalypse (Book of Revelation), and of which seventy-one have survived, presents vivid images drawn from what is undoubtedly the most “visual” of all the books of the Bible. Panel 64 depicts the “Whore of Babylon” sitting on a mound, gazing at her beauty in a mirror and surrounded by fifteen “Y”s in floating mandorlas (fig. 47). There is no need to provide any explanation for the presence of the “Y”s. Fourteenth-century viewers would have known all too well the significance of the letter and the message that the whore had taken the wrong branch in life.
There are recent examples as well. Consider, for example, the graphic novel Y: The Last Man (sixty issues between 2002 and 2008) in which the Y poses the question “Why?” for the protagonist Yorick (the “Y” man) who is the only man left living on earth. The title page of the first issue presents the protagonist along with his evolutionary ancestor and sidekick, a monkey, against a large “Y” on which are overlaid maps of the chromosomes X and Y, the latter one of course defining the masculine sex.2 Marjorie Celona also notes the quintessentially modern value of the Y as a chromosome, to which her novel Y will add also the “Y” of the YMCA. Her book opens with a passage that could almost be from Victor Hugo:
Y. That perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? Me with my arms outstretched, feet in first position. The chromosome half of us don’t have. Second to last in the alphabet: almost there. Coupled with an L, let’s make an adverb. A modest X, leg’s closed. Y or N? Yes, of course. Upside-down peace sign. Little bird tracks in the sand. (no page number)
From the fork in the road to the male chromosome, the letter becomes a catalyst for a meditation on meaning in the world.3
In a similar manner the splendid Virgin of the Dry Tree painted by the Flemish painter Petrus Christus around 1462 (fig. 48) can count on the viewer understanding the significance of a letter’s presence with no need of explanation. Petrus’s beautiful image portrays the Virgin Mary with Child appearing against a dessicated tree. The image commemorates a vision Philippe the Good allegedly had before a battle with the French in which he was ultimately victorious. Like the Whore of Babylon, the Virgin is also surrounded by fifteen letters, but this time the letter is a lower-case “A.” The reference, as viewers of the period would have known, is to the beginning of “Ave Maria,” the “Ave” being the typological counterpart (and reversal) of the Old Testament “Eva” or Eve.
In the case of both the Angers Tapestry and the Petrus Christus painting, the world surrounding the personages is filled with a moral letter. But then, from Augustine on, Christian culture views the world as so many letters that make up a text that the good Christian reads for his or her salvation. Every object and every event in one’s world is an opportunity to read “charitably” in Augustinian terms or, to use a more lettered expression, to take the right branch of the “Y.”
As we might expect given the overall thesis of this book, in more recent centuries the meanings attached to the letter “Y,” even when it is viewed as a metaphor of the world, might move in the direction of secularization. We have already briefly considered the personalized mythology of Victor Hugo for whom the “Y” loomed large. However, it is worth glancing at a larger portion of the passage by the great nineteenth-century master:
Avez-vous remarqué combien l’Y est une lettre pittoresque qui a des significations sans nombre? L’arbre est un Y, l’embranchement de deux routes est un Y, le confluent de deux rivières est un Y, une tête d’âne est un Y, un verre sur son pied est un Y, un lys sur sa tige est un Y, un suppliant qui lève les bras au ciel est un Y.
Au reste cette observation peut s’étendre à tout ce qui constitue élémentairement l’écriture humaine ... Toutes les lettres ont d’abord été des signes et tous les signes ont d’abord été des images.
La société humaine, le monde, l’homme tout entier est dans l’alphabet. La maçonnerie, l’astronomie, la philosophie, toutes les sciences ont là leur point de départ, imperceptible mais réel; et cela doit être. (Alpes et Pyrenées 50)
(Have you noticed how the Y is a picturesque letter that has innumerable significations? A tree is a Y, the forking of two roads is a Y, the running together of two rivers is a Y, a donkey’s head is a Y, a glass on its stem is a Y, a lily on its stalk is a Y, a supplicating person who raises his arms to the sky is a Y.
For the rest this observation can be extended to everything that constitutes in an elementary way human writing ... All letters were signs first, and all signs were images first.
Human society, the world, man in his entirety is in the alphabet. Masonry, astronomy, philosophy, and all the sciences have their point of departure there, imperceptible but real. And that is as it must be.4
In this passage Victor Hugo returns of course to the “Y” as a fork in the road. But he also sees the letter as much more than that. The “Y” is a ubiquitous presence that characterizes countless aspects of our world and has, as he says, an infinity of meanings. While not referencing Christianity in any direct way, Hugo nevertheless restates the long-standing analogy between the alphabet and the cosmos. He finds, as he says, “human society, the world, [and] man in his entirety … in the alphabet” even as he finds a letter such as the “Y” mapped countless times onto the world.
The letter “Y” is a prime example of how the letter-world analogy holds true throughout many periods even as the ideological particulars evolve over the course of two millennia. Other letters could lend themselves to similar diachronic analysis, though there is little point in demonstrating this phenomenon twenty-six times or more. The degree to which the alphabet is viewed as a structure that both represents the world and also makes up our reality appears to be considerable, regardless of the historical period.
To be sure, the persistence of these associations has implications for our current society and for the future. Fears that alphabetic writing is somehow in danger of being “lost,” either because of modern technologies of communication (smart phones, text messaging, etc.) or because our culture is remarkably “visual” (by which people seem to mean it is driven by icons and graphics) appear to be overstated. Text-messaging is textually based above all, and the shortcuts in terms of orthography in no way endanger alphabetic culture; certainly text-messaging is less radical in its orthographical revisions than were some medieval manuscript abbreviations or the proposals of sixteenth-century reformers. On a different front, proponents of “asemic” writing are fond of claiming that alphabetical writing is doomed or dead, but they offer no evidence of this beyond their own claims and their esoteric productions. Alphabetical writing is all around us, and for many people in the third millennium of the Common Era, not a day goes by without reading some lettered text, whether in a public space, a book, a set of directions, or on the internet.
Our culture may be enamoured of the visual, but for the communication of precise and specific information, visual images are of only limited use. To the degree that they are icons that are conventionally accepted they become consensual signifiers – as, say, for the pictograms for hand dryers in public washrooms. Over time they may even, with simplification, become completely arbitrary signifiers (already not all hand dryers correspond to the current pictogram). Some pictograms are not clear to all observers. The pictograms for some Olympic sports are anything but self evident, even though such common ones as those for running or cycling may seem transparent. Moreover, they are often modified from one Olympiad to another (see Meggs and Purvis 428–34).
We know of cultures for which only pictogrammic writing existed: such was the Meso-American society Hernán Cortés came upon when in 1519 he began his conquest of what we now call Mexico. The pre-Columbian texts that have survived are pictogrammic with only the rare image that is a rebus referring to pronunciation. The result is a kind of writing that no one but a highly trained priest or scholar could decipher; only a person with the requisite training and erudition could understand and explain the meaning of the text since what was encoded was not the specific words to be pronounced. Although a pictogrammic text can contain great amounts of information to be decoded, one cannot, nevertheless, write a sonnet or a sestina in a pictogrammic manner. It is impossible to encode the exact words to be used.5
It seems unlikely that Western culture will abandon alphabetic writing in the near or even relatively distant future. We are far too attached to the ease of communication that it affords us within any given language, even if it requires learning a new set of grammatical and phonetic structures, though not often a different alphabet, whenever we move to a different language, which is not the case for pictogrammic writing. Our computers may communicate with each other in the language of 1s and 0s, but we need those long binary strings to be retranslated into our strangely ungainly but remarkably succinct system of about twenty-six letters in order for us to send and receive messages.
If the ancient Greeks marvelled at the power of their alphabet and considered that, despite their knowledge of the historical origin of their letters, the power of their small repertoire of graphic signs was such that it seemed only to have been able to come from a divine source, several millennia later we are still often in awe of what our letters are capable of, whether it is a matter of a great Shakespearean poem or, as in the case of William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), a note left in the kitchen that becomes the great poem, “This is just to say …”
In 2013 I was in Berlin for a week. Berlin is a city with an enormous variety of public graphic art, whether mimetic images many stories tall on the sides of abandoned buildings or personalized graffiti. What caught my eye, however, was a spray-painted message on the wall of a construction site in the centre of the city on the small island where Berlin’s great museums are found. It read simply in capital letters, “I don’t want to spread my name. I just want [to] write letters,” with a large 2013 written just beneath (fig. 49).
This message seemed to me to be of particular significance. First of all, one had to consider that this anonymous statement was of sufficient importance to some person for him or her to procure a can of black spray paint, search out a suitable spot – one sufficiently large and in a place where many people would pass by – and then go there, probably in the dead of night when there was not likely to be anyone else present, in order to leave this message. Significant as well was that the statement was written in English, though probably not by a native English speaker despite the fact that the writer seemed to know English quite well. Writing in English would, of course, be a way of reaching the largest possible international audience in an area of Berlin through which people of many nations pass daily. The grammatical oversight in the second sentence was telling. The missing “to” was probably due more to haste than to ignorance since the first sentence also had “want to + infinitive,” so the author must have been familiar with that English construction but did not sense it intuitively the way a native speaker would (in German, for example, the modal verb wollen would be followed directly by an infinitive). One can see, however, that a second person has faintly added the missing “to” as an editorial emendation, the way readers in medieval manuscripts would make marginal corrections a thousand years ago. The missing apostrophe in the first sentence and the missing word in the second were probably the result of working fast: the writer could not know whether or not the Polizei might appear out of nowhere at any moment.
As for the content of the graffiti, it says a lot with only a few words. It is not only anonymous, but in fact it calls specific attention to its anonymity. The author refuses to give – or, as s/he tellingly puts it, “to spread” – his or her name, pointedly declining to participate in a name/fame discourse (I suspect that the writer was familiar with that common rhyme). The author did not want to be known as a person, but rather as pure alphabetic text. Indeed, s/he signs off with simply a non-alphabetical squiggle under the graffiti. S/he wished to leave his or her mark in the world as simply a series of so many alphabetic marks. The alphabet was both the medium and the message, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Personal identity was shunned in favour of the satisfaction of becoming pure text. The great twentieth-century French critic Roland Barthes might say that the author chose to be dead in order for life to be bestowed completely on the letters. The writing of the letters was to leave a message about the writing of letters, and the tautology is strangely poetic and haunting.
What is more, the very visual style of these letters makes for a kind of “anti-graffiti graffiti.” We are accustomed to ballooning graffiti letters, usually that identify a particular person by means of a “tag” (indeed, the casual observer may find the tag almost unreadable). Here we have the opposite. The author has taken pains to provide us with letters of extraordinary clarity and regularity, such as we find in printed books (the same does not apply to the numbers), while refusing to give an identity.
What is more, the author does not speak of writing words but of writing letters. In other words, the statement references the almost infinite combinations that the alphabetic letters are capable of creating. Before they gel into words, letters are pure possibility, pure potentiality. Perhaps this is why the author chose a site that was ephemeral. In the midst of Berlin’s great museums, which are designed to house the past for as much of eternity as we can conceive (the week I was in Berlin, the Pergamonmuseum had a large exhibit that included texts from Uruk written 6000 years ago, including cuneiform tablets of Gilgamesh), this graffiti was penned on the side of a temporary wall surrounding a construction site for an as-yet-unrealized future. Here today, gone tomorrow. If books (which is to say writing) are the key of remembrance, as Chaucer put it in The Legend of Good Women, the letters themselves are like so many leaves in the wind, like the folios on which Sybil tends to write her prophecies, according to Virgil’s Aenead. The gift of writing is, as Plato tells us in the Phaedrus, a pharmakon – that is, both a poison for memory and a remedy for forgetting. The graffiti writer knows that the individual message on the side of this wall will be forgotten, but the desire to write letters will endure. New messages will be written and forgotten and more still that will follow them.
The Berlin graffiti writer does not, then, hope that his or her name will stay on peoples’ lips, as Ovid does at the end of the Metamorphoses, but that people will recognize the desire that is inscribed in all alphabetical letters – the desire to communicate across time and distances. Curiously, but also fittingly, the ellipsis of the “to” in the second sentence hurries us forward to the real point of the message: the excitement and power of letters and the desire to use them. Countless scribes, calligraphers, typesetters, graphic artists, and of course writers of the present time and of past centuries will recognize themselves in that second sentence. The graffiti celebrates the magic and power of alphabetic letters.
Our graffiti writer is not the first person to be drunk with the power of letters, nor the last. The inebriation of alphabetic combinations is found perhaps most obviously in Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE), in Petronius (27–66 CE), in Jean de Meun (1250–1305), in Rabelais, and in James Joyce (1882–1941), but it inheres in the works of countless other writers as well as in the more private correspondences of millions of people over the course of several millennia. We cannot imagine Western culture apart from the writing of Western culture by means of a succession of alphabets. Prior to that all is mystery – “the night of time,” as the French say.
Which is to say not only that light was shed on our culture by the alphabet but that the alphabet was that very light and thus is also the culture itself.