X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu

Hi friends,

I am making letters, the Alphabet, as light sculptures two feet square. Let me know which one(s) you would like.They are all one-of-a-kind pieces but I will be doing more than one R, more than one Z, and considering that my mom's initials were MMM, more than one M. And so far, this has been crazy fun. Let's keep this ball rolling!

Next. To the homework. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot. Alphabet! I have a book started with terms like phonemic, diacritics, allographs and multigraphs. What a bottomless swamp! Letters are graphemes, the smallest functional unit of a writing system. Simple write/right/rite?! Yeah, no. Acrophony refers to a conceptual framework where each letter is associated with a sound. Instantly we are in the weeds. A letter makes a sound? Like in the word "right." What are the g and h doing in there? In Spanish and Finnish, almost all letters make sounds and yet in Spanish "h" exists and is never spoken. My own experience with French feels like most of the letters are not pronounced. In Hawaiian, a written language invented by missionaries in 1822 to expose the "natives" to the Bible, every letter is spoken, but there are only 13 and 5 of those are vowels. The humuhumunukunukuapua'a is the Hawaiian state fish. Quiz later. That's a few syllables. By the way, the world wide web is three. www is nine. Only humans could have invented this mess and cling to it so dearly. 

So let's pause, or paws, for a minute, and expand a bit. When you are thinking, do your thoughts exist completely without letters involved? I have writer friends who would say, "Hell no/know/knows/nose." What if you are bad at spelling and great at painting and think of a pale red? Are you thinking in images or in words? When you are dreaming, do people speak? Is it always your language? When you are dreaming are you ever reading words on a page? Are you able to think without using words? If not, how much of the defining aspects of the thought are a function of the letters that make up those words? In other words, does pink exist to a Hawaiian in 1750 that is different from ākala, or the word in Russian with eight letters with a backwards 3 and a small capital B in the middle? Pink. Pink. The sound, the letters, make you think of a concept that is strong, bright, rosy, pale, sweet, friendly, floral, sensual... One could argue that the letters don't do the heavy lifting, the word does -- it's the selection and the arrangement of the graphemes. 

Egyptians in the 5th century BC had a proto alphabet that was pictorial and highly elaborate, but the real grandad of most global alphabets comes from the Phoenicians who started a cuneiform lettering in the 13th and 12th century BC. They travelled and spread their "abjad" widely in the 9th century BC, democratizing and uplifting the commoners from a status below the wealthy -- the churches and the royal elites whose control of the populace centered around the ability to keep invoices, deeds, taxes and trade records. The "abjad" system had only consonants and the reader had to supply the vowels. Consider PT could mean pet, pit, pate, put, Pete, pot, pat, Pat, peat, pout... Or, I suppose, physical therapy. Eventually, this grew into regional variations like the Mycenaean Greeks with their 87 symbols as their alphabet. 

We tend to think of letters as simply a visual version of speech. Acrophony is a nice idea, but speaking is nuanced and regional and outrageous and hilarious. Say potato. Or pa tate ah. Or taters. I have heard potatoes sound like it starts with a b. AND the same letter makes different sounds in slightly different arrangements -- feet and fête, apt and ape, or same sounds, different letters -- fazes and phases. How about g in the word "gauge?" I realize I am stating the obvious, but my job is to draw focus to the overlooked, the undersung, the shimmering, patterns in the dust. Our language is ridiculous and sublime. Here we say zee for Z and most everyone else says zed. The global economy is run on American English, an absurd oxymoron. There are a few languages who write right to left left. Take note of all the letter forms that are derived from ancient weaponry.

The last missive I sent was Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, the first letters in the naval longhand speech for ABC. Alpha: first, strongest, top dog. Bravo: YAY! Well done chap. Charlie: everybody knows a cool Charlie.  This week it's, XYZ. X-Ray: nobody wants that, ever. Yankee: well, northerners, ball club, guys who saved Europe maybe, sort of. Zulu: the unknown, Africa, tribal, ancient, foreign, mysterious...

As I said, this could be a book. Maybe I'll write it after I make a bunch of letters. As a final thought, "alphabetical order"? Who decided that? Think about it. What if it was backwards all along and we never noticed. My friend with the last name Zwiefel was always, always last in line. You want your phone to play something cool. Put Aaron Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" in your Apple music list. Defaults to that all the time. Boom.

Thanks for reading this letter about letters. Order one. I'll make it for you. First two orders are half price for all you people who love to read letters all the time. Like you, yes you. 

Piece and luv, 

b mac 

P.S. "I can't seem to find the thing I want to look for," said my friend Gus once upon a time. I love words. 

P.P.S. And now Fall. Or Autumn, sounds better. Cheers!