Writing Music

For most European language, the smallest building block, the letter, has no meaning in itself. Its smaller than its role in any parts. Standing alone, only a few letters can even be pronounced (without modifying them such as making “T” into “tee” or “tuh”) and have no meaning autonomously. The letter is then built from. Beginning with putting it in concert with other letters in sequence, thus forming a standalone object to manipulate (the word). The words are combined upwards still, where the small word is combined and reordered in order to form larger accumulations. Thus we have the way of writing in European languages, where meaning is drawn out of meaningless units and kept in careful harmony and interlocking strength, accumulative sculpting.

With their smallest units of construction being higher than English, Japanese makes an interesting opposition. At the most basic level is a single syllable, which, due to having legibility at its individual level, can be used on its own in a way English letters cannot. This is seen in the onomatopoeia, equivalents for exclamation: “あ” vs “ah”. In English, two letters, which are nothingness on their own, effervescent and meaningless, must be combined to something larger than the sum of their parts, while in Japanese, the single character syllable stands on its own, unable to be broken down any further.

This ties into what Ezra Pound identified in Chinese. Japanese word construction occurs by sequencing these syllables, such as in a strand of DNA, an object made by a linear order, one after the other. Linear constructions can be superseded by non-linear constructions, as in the case of kanji, which carries with it the same ideogrammic form of Chinese. In Chinese, the character has its component radicals which are arranged in orders that determine the meaning of the character by how they are nested and combined into one another.

Pound’s overall obsession with this way of writing a text has wider consequences than Chinese alone. The common way of making art uses the same form, from the development of heraldry, to the works of art produced in formal style before more innovative and abstract or realistic techniques are discovered.

Hebrew uses letters as its foundational root, but leaves parts of them unspoken and other parts left open to link to other texts. Gematria is built into the numbers, allowing recombination into mathematical text by seemingly nonsensical sequences. Further, as the vowels are left unwritten in older forms and in later forms, only written as added marks upon the consonants, the way of reading is written anew with each returning.

Writing is in all these cases, the manipulation of objects. The basic action, combination brings to mind musical modes of expression. Words interact as music does, resonating across voids of asimilarity with each other and thus producing pelasing tones in difference, in contrast, in sequence.