do the write thing

What happens when meaning slips away beneath the profusion of signs? When, by writing from drawing or drawing from writing, it becomes solely a question of expressing, by any means available.

At the risk that this metalanguage might traverse the sky without striking any target. Unless, unless one of us happens to pass by, ready to be moved by this soliloquy, ready to understand – literally to take into oneself – this semantic flood akin to the “Babelian drive.” And that person would then become the providential recipient of this sibylline outpouring, not as an exceptional cryptographer, but as someone rediscovering within themselves all the latent potentials of expression. One capable of feeling the evocative power of the ideogram – where image and text are inseparable – as in immemorial times, or of delighting in wanderings where science and poetry move in unison. Perhaps even of experiencing the subtle music of graphorrheas that unfold like mantras.

Rhythm and composition, in a constant tension, seem to seek the revelation of a new, primal meaning, like a cry. Just as we speak of outbursts of voice, should we not also speak of outbursts of signs? In this way, all glossography would no longer appear to us as an inability to master the codes of language, but as a means of transcending and reformulating them.

What then strikes us in these palimpsests, these magical encryptions, these sedimented words, these hypnotic iterations, these secret vocables, these asemic writings, is the formidable plasticity of a primordial language that would contain all others. As Jean-Marie Gallais writes, “the signifiers ultimately detach themselves from the signified, becoming music for the eyes.”

This fourth chapter of Do The Write Thing thus concludes this first cycle devoted to graphein. This Greek word, meaning “to make incisions,” evokes that moment when humanity invented the world by engraving signs on the surface of things.