From What’s “The Urge of the Letter”?

by Matthew Battles

May 21, 2009

Though the ways of writing have proliferated through time, they’re connected like some existential cursive stretching from clay tablets to computers. The letterforms with which we’re most intimate—those of the Roman alphabet—have traveled a long way since their birth as sketchy renderings of oxheads and houses. But they still carry those shapes, along with marks left by Greek scribes and Roman stonecutters, medieval monks and Renaissance goldsmiths, designers and sign painters and artists and engineers.

And all this stuff we’re doing with pixels and silicon, with networks and nodes, tweets and tumblelogs? It’s not the negation of all that came before—it’s not the end of the world as we know it. It’s just the next loop, part of the cursive line.

A species like ours can do perfectly well without writing for millennia upon millennia—but once we take the plunge and blunder into writing, we had better be all in.

From “Writing is Radical”

May 26, 2009

What are the roots of writing? What makes it look like it does? Despite vast differences in their appearance and in the systems that govern them, most forms of written characters share profoundly similar traits: they’re made of lines that cross, connect, and loop, and they arrange themselves into linear sets. Why is this the case? Why don’t we have writing systems that convey meaning by, say, color or hue, or size, or relative location? ...

All this speculation about the roots of perception glosses over the basic history of graphic signs: whether alphabetic or ideographic, they start out as pictures of things. The fundamentals of perception provide a basis for understanding why writing works for us, and why it has conserved these signs so well over these three millennia. It’s remarkably conservative, the alphabet, at a root/radical/topological level. And this, too: characters don’t evolve only to be seen and read, but made. Written. And line is a handy tool for this kind of making...

I want to say that we’re wired for writing—although it’s likely more accurate to say that writing employs our wiring, as it must do. Were we wired like dragonflies, or even dogs, our writing would take remarkably different forms.

And yet this is our world, not that of dragonflies—there are no natural scenes, no standard configurations, without our particular perceptions. We are fibered together out of the world that our fibers weave.