(some notes from an e-mail to Tim Gaze, Sept., 2013)
Maybe (linear or nonlinear) “experimental writing” and “visual poetry” are simply first definitions of the vast living environment of works made by the worldwide community of people involved in asemic (and so pansemic) writing and in the making of abstract stuff.
And: about the words “writing” and “abstract” —maybe they’re
narrow definitions of areas of signs. A suitable term could be “sign” indeed.
The life
of signs is perhaps the ‘thing’
we try to deal with. A “sign” is an entity which, in itself, does not have an actual “itself”. It
absolutely conveys something else. It’s
not narrow, it’s an arrow. It’s a non-”quid” referred/referring to some (other)
“quid”. And so: the reference or transfer or passage may be somehow / somewhere broken.
And this fact is the
alpha in “a”/semic.
[And —at the same time— any “alpha” is a “pan”: any
limit is also a secondary path or crack, a way for widening the view]
The incomplete or complete rupture or fracture of a
(still presumable) transitive line
(of the transmission of meaning) makes us call the sign an “intransitive”
one. Or a “partially transitive” one.
For example: a signal or warning, on an unknown road
and land, telling us something we don’t catch at all. A flashing light. We
stare at its colours, but we can’t translate them into some kind of knowledge
about an actual situation we ought to react to. By the way, we’re mesmerized by
its effort in telling us something (or —better— its clear effort to move an
unclear cloud of meaning[s] from A to B). We miss the point; still we go on
staring at some vague (say abstract) point.
Shadows show something we don’t catch; still we cannot
stop watching, and we don’t.
[This is the “alpha” turning into “pan”].
We’re almost 4 thousand years far from the birth of
writing, but the written signs & glyphs & traces in caves are
definitely older. So much older. In “Caves of Forgotten Dreams” Werner Herzog shows us the (partially intransitive)
signs of men who lived 30,000 years ago. It’s not “writing”, it’s (perhaps) carving / painting signs. Figures.
Now we try to go
very far —back into the past: pitch black.
In a time where not only the human race but the very
beginning of life itself had not yet appeared on our planet. Fragments/crystals of zircon (here a pic from a documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu16701JhOo)
found in West-Australian rocks dating back to 4.4 billion years ago seem to
reveal the presence of water on Earth in an incredibly early stage of its
history: and we may consider these crystals and fragments as “signs” (of/from
the ur-environment): partially transitive
ones, made not by human hand, but by nature —Earth— itself. (Signs addressed to
no one, to no one’s eye)