Cup-poetry manifesto

Review: The World’s Writing Systems

Clive Scott posits in discussing eco-translation that our very alphabet divorces us from our lived environment. Our alphabet is overly precise, logical, and bars the phenomenology of reading.

Abjads, scripts in which vowels are implied, embrace ambiguity, and maximise space. The experience of writing a scripts in which vowels are explicit is the pursuit of a democracy that barricades the existence of reading in time and space.

Our left-to-right reading punishes the traditional understanding of reading as a wheel, as a sequence of spokes. Mesoamerican scripts, for example, use a boustrophedon, connecting writing to the plough. The signs themselves are structures.

For writing in this period was destined for inscription. Thus, the kind of two-dimensional writing we usually see now would have been impossible. While writing is ubiquitous, we are pummeled daily with flat, left-to-right writing. Including this.

In Ogham, another boustrophedon, sed for funerary inscriptions in Ireland, the tally-like signs, apparently derived from Latin characters, designate parts of the body, or trees. There are mathematically related symbols for “elbow”, “pine”, and “willow”. And earth.

Funerary inscriptions must be brief, yet sacred. They must spin meaning from tiny fragments of lines, and be readily-carveable.
 
Both the expansiveness of our need to represent vowels, and our left-to-right writing, imprison us in certain cognitive patterns.

Is it thus to develop a new system of alphabet? Unfortunately, divine revelation does not produce the best alphabets. Malia Gomango received 24 letters of Sorang Sampeng on a vision in the hills. While the letters he developed may have been shaped by the hills in which the new alphabet was given to him, the alphabet’s lack of connection with bartering made it unsuitable to carry divine texts.

For religion and divinity is waging, bartering.

What about cup-formed numbers? Abjads? The kind of compromise I’ve been thinking about with English is destroying our sensibility of it as a left-to-right language. What if it is a top-to-bottom language, as apparently in Ge’ez? Or a purely rotating language, as the Hawulti monument. This monument rises and cycles in the cyclicality of its inscription.

But it must remain of the earth. Abjads ensure only what is strictly necessary is written. But, in turn, they limit writing.

But our own phonetic palette is getting thinner. And so cuppoetry restores visual language to its logical, rational, aesthetic principles, leaving us to imagine the phonemes in between, recreate phonemes, restoring spoken language paradoxically to its primacy.

Cup-poetry wraps around our skin like a bandage.

It is of the environment insofar as it uses items of commerce for visual-linguistic voyeurism. In other words, we poets are linguistic pigeons, defying, in a small way, the logic of mass-production.

Consider Hankul script, for example. Uniquely, it is arranged into syllabic blocks, into newly symmetrical patterns. Written language, by its sheer beauty, is divided from spoken language.

Cup-poetry allows no punctuation, since punctuation only makes sense in right-to-left reading. Writing as it has been experienced for the majority of humans, without the unnecessary need for word-dividers, is restored. Or, word-dividers are compulsory, rather than optional. Punctuation becomes a mere cyclical organizational principle.

Or so we hope. Or delude ourselves.

Each linguistic character is a face, within the cycle. A seeing, breathing, sensing artefact. A reality. A metallurgy. A bronze statuette, scanning the three-dimensional realm, engraved in our environment.

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Meanwhile, I hold in my hand an abjad-poem. Every reading is entirely different, as some part of my cognition is creating, automatically, a different poem. A new text in a wholly sonic and semantic sense. This is not the poem I composed in my head. It is an odd, cycling shorthand. In one of so many instances, ‘ply’ is ‘play’ or ‘ply’, is ‘ploy’. My mind is forced to decipher. And, in deciphering, we are creating.

This is partially why it occurs to me that so many texts cannot be deciphered. Because they are polyvalent, to use the term of grammatologists. They have multiple possible meanings.

(Also to be discussed: John Clare losing all his vowels, so his brain becomes an abjad.)