THE JOY OF TEXT 2
“… we could scarcely bring ourselves to believe it altogether the work of nature.” [1]
Like Ovid, Hermes [2] looked up, seeing a flock of cranes flying in arrow formation, and this V form became one of the letters of the Greek alphabet. Kipling echoes this in his story of how the alphabet was made, imagining the Neolithic construction of letters from landscape clues, such as “a little bit of the winding Wagai River for the nice windy-windy wa-sound” (W).[3]
For Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, the apparently natural phenomenon of a series of huge chasms was slowly revealed to have a textual form. Pym recorded the chasms’ shape as he moved through them, and found a series of indentations on the wall of one of the chasms which bore “some little resemblance to alphabetical characters.”
The precise formation of the chasm will be best understood by means of a delineation taken on the spot; for I had luckily with me a pocketbook and a pencil, which I preserved with great care through a long series of subsequent adventures, and to which I am indebted for memoranda of many subjects which would otherwise have been crowded from my remembrance. This figure [...] gives the general outlines of the chasm, without the minor cavities in the sides, of which there were several, each cavity having a corresponding protuberance opposite.[4]
Poe describes in the notes how the shapes which the chasms formed “constitute an Ethiopian verbal root ‘To be shady’.”[5] Thus at both a scale beyond immediate comprehensibility (the chasms themselves), and at a readable size (on the chasm wall), Pym had discovered an encoded message written in the landscape.
To be continued…
[1] Edgar Allan Poe, (1992). “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” In The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. London: Everyman’s Library, David Campbell Publishers Ltd. (originally published 1838), p.222
[2] This story is also attributed to Palemedes and to Apollo, and I’m still unravelling it.
[3] Rudyard Kipling. (1950) “How the Alphabet was Made.” In Just So Stories. London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. (originally published 1902) P.148
[4] Poe, (1992). “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”, p. 223
[5] ibid, p. 241
