There is something enduringly mysterious about the human capacity for language. Our mouths and throats contain an array of muscles and tissue that allow us to modulate the air we take in, transforming the breath that fuels our lives into a source of social connection. We can distinguish between minute variations of sound and pitch, inferring all kinds of data beyond the explicit message, from the mood and origin of the speaker to their gender and relative status. Our brains can interpret these signals without any conscious effort. Language incarnates even our innermost thoughts and ideas.
None of this is to mention writing. A far more recent invention, it seems almost miraculous that our eyes can provide the same inputs as our ears, such that we can glance at a page in our native language and interpret it without a sound. Alphabets, syllabaries, pictographs – we can rearrange the abstract irregularities of our half-formed thoughts to suit the limitations of a tangible, permanent mode of expression. The written word is, in a way, almost a separate language from speech – one restricted and refined by rules of grammar and punctuation, where the emotional cues of tone and gesture are traded for greater precision and deliberation. It would be as strange to hear someone speak as they write as it is to read a quote transcribed verbatim, with its tics and tangents left intact.
Exploring the various uses of different forms of communication is one of my great passions. Yet, as I alluded to in my last article, I am not fond of visual art that is too “syntactical”: art with a message that can be reduced to a single, speakable statement. If an artist’s work is nothing more than an allegory, with symbols mapping one-to-one onto reality, something intrinsic to the medium has been abandoned. Perhaps it is the artist’s trust in the viewer and the relationship between the two. Maybe it is due reverence to the nuances and complexity that should keep us humble in the face of a richly multifaceted reality.
A recent encounter with the unique art form of asemic writing has encouraged me to push this idea further to our visible incarnations of ephemeral speech. It highlights how the forms of our symbols, their stylization, their placement on the page, their structures of meaning-making, are as essential to communication as the content of the message itself.
Asemic writing is closer to art than to writing. The word “asemic” comes from the same root as the word “semantic”, i.e., that which is a-semic has no semantic meaning. Artists who engage in asemic writing attempt to create forms that look like letters, pictographs, or other meaning-marks without themselves carrying any significance. The results can look at first glance like anything, from a foreign script to an alien crop circle to a geometric diagram to an illegible set of scribbled notes.
The idea of asemic writing has been around in some form or another for thousands of years; we as humans have always been fascinated by our relationship to the written word. Chinese calligraphers, for instance, such as the infamous “Crazy” Zhang Xu, would craft poems so stylized as to render them illegible (often with the help of ample drink). It is also possible that the Voynich Manuscript could be an example of an asemic script – though, of course, we may never know.
Conversely, and on the more mystical side, there have been those who draw significance out of our apparently arbitrary choice of communicative markings. Ancient Taoists believed that trained masters could write diagrams on slips of paper, and the act of writing them would, in turn, directly impact their chi. In Judaism and Islam, on the other hand, letters have long been assigned numeric values corresponding to various abstract, spiritual meanings that transcend our collective understanding and are perhaps even bestowed by the divine.
Even more recently, people have begun to push the boundaries of what can be recognizable as text. My favorite example of this phenomenon is the short story, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, better known for its film adaptation, Arrival, 2016. You deserve to see the plot unfold for yourself, but suffice to say, it certainly pushes the boundaries of what extremities of language our brains could theoretically comprehend.
These experiments and reflections on meaning-making comprise the impetus of asemic writing. But at the core of the craft are the mechanics, which are so obvious they can be easy to overlook: the forms of the signs and their placement on the page. What is it about the composition of written language that allows our minds to interpret it? What ratio of positive to negative space does it need to clue us in? Is there truly something innately significant about language, or is it all in our collective mind? As with the many sounds, expressions, and gestures that make up our verbal encounters, how many unnoticed cues are on the page?
Asemic writing is entrancing, and I believe that is because it pushes language itself beyond syntax. Expressing a thought with the right words is undoubtedly an art in itself; in fact, it can be such a Herculean effort that everything else is sacrificed in its path. Yet writing – like speaking – is far more than the words we jot down. It is the meter we create with them, the fonts we use to adorn them, the margins we place around them, the space we allow between them. (My articles for MutualArt read differently on my word processor than on the carefully designed webpage on your screen.) Asemic writing highlights these other elements of beautiful text, which we often see as secondary, allowing them to shine all the brighter in the absence of context.
Case in point, I’ve rarely seen much of an issue with judging books by their covers – in the most literal sense. I have, as a general rule, been far more satisfied with my beautiful books than with the ones with wonky text and a cover that could have been pieced together in Microsoft Word. Considerations of the modern publishing industry aside, every aspect of the book experience, from the heft as I pick it up to the cover art to the spacing of words on the page, tells me something about the story before I begin reading. Even if all the words were gone, replaced by meaningless markers, I could intuit portions of the setting or plot. A simple story becomes richer and more significant because of its presentation (look at Le Petit Prince). These design choices, like the text itself, are evidence of the person or people who made them. They communicate without words, telling me who has cared about this work before me.
In this way, as “meaningless” as asemic writing is by definition, I find that, as long as humans make it, it still captures something of the human soul. Perhaps that is why we as a species cannot seem to escape it. It is like staring into the looking glass at a world that isn’t, but could have been: at a person and even a culture that appears to be telling us something our minds cannot grasp. It has no syntactic meaning, yet it’s art – artifice. Can the work of human hands ever truly be nothing?
Originally published in MutualArt Magazine on August 23, 2024.
Comments