I        /        Kivland        /        I am a woman of letters. They trickle after my name, b and m and p and h and d. Several can be silent when they appear in words, one sees them but does not say them. Four constrict the vocal tract in their enunciation, more or less that is, using the tongue, lips, and nose. These letters push air from the lungs, huff and puff, pulmonic. And a, I have an a. As a child I learnt that a is for apple. It would, in truth, be more accurate to say I learnt that a is for Apfel, der Apfel. I learnt about big A and little A. When I was very young, we were told to put our arms out wide for one and to put our hands close together for the other. Letters were formed by our small bodies. When I was older, I learnt about autre and Autre. I wrote them as a and A. They were the small other and the big Other. The little letter was imaginary and the big letter was symbolic. The little one was supposed to be written in italics, in opposition to the capital of the big one. I learnt to combine them, adding, for example, a big S down which I was taught to draw a line, barring it, or to precede the little italicised a by an italicised I, enclosing the little a in brackets—I was told this was a way to distinguish an a on its own—a lonely little object of desire in a matheme of fantasy—from a specular image, which I read as image plus object. I knew that something was set in motion: letter to letter. I try to orientate myself and you in the space of language as darkness falls. I write to you from the edge of the horizon. Above the horizon there is no sky.








S,


Au commencement sera le Sommeil, ‘in the beginning,’ is where Paul Valéry begins Alphabet, his alphabetically minded prose series of twenty-four parts. And now from you, an opening. A missive arrives addressed to me / us. A dispatch from France. It starts with an I, the speaker, presumably yourself, the perceptive eye from which you write. Or is it, in fact, a numeral, the first in a chain, are there more to follow; is this the number one? I, as in me, your respondent, am reminded of Stephen Dedalus’s rationalisation: ‘I, I, and I. I.’    ·     Before long, a second letter. This time you write from ink to thread, a sewn stitch holding, like Emily Dickinson’s fragile paper manuscripts, the sequence in time and language in space     ·     Crossing the channel and channels, another fragment appears     ·     Day four, the fourth dispatch, fresh from your hand, but how to save these daily lines, preserve their aliveness and fix the excitement upon delivery and first reading, and to what ends? What does it mean to hold onto correspondence? To keep rather than discard. Are they for me, the recipient, or a secondary set of eyes? Is it evidence, proof we conversed? Or to serve some future archive, patching a life from scattered threads? In a book I once skimmed on the story of the alphabet, its writer described the words mankind leaves behind as ‘fossil poetry’ : language is, in the petrified letters that remain, synchronously mortal and immortal · Envelopes wrap. Their sides fold inwards as a clasped embrace. Sealed by the slip of a tongue, they conceal from view, keeping words private and protecting reputations from ruin and defame     ·     From great distances your letters have travelled, journeying from A to Z to A, spanning the linguistic, the geographic, the temporal, the philosophic, the psychologic, the romantic. I enjoyed today’s with my cereal     ·     Gertrude Stein’s impish children’s book To Do, itself a kind of alphabet primer, begins with the following: ‘Alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday.’ We receive letters and cards on our birthday, sentiments and wishes marking time, its succession numerically, yet it is the words that ease the transition, geeing us from one year to the next; hip hip     ·     Here the pen fell, a thought lingers a little longer, blots of ink leave us and lead us into suspense…     ·     In the likelihood what is sent falls on deaf ears, it is easier for the agitated and worrisome mind to imagine their correspondence has been lost, marooned undeliverables in the dead-letter office. There is no coming to terms with the truth that one is engaged in a lopsided conversation, a language delivered into a void     ·     Jealousy is for J in Man Ray’s 1948 lithographic edition Alphabet for Adults. In the book’s preface he writes of ‘disinherited symbols,’ ‘discarded props,’ ‘inadequate associations’, that ‘a letter always suggests a word.’ J is for Julia Jean, Lana Turner’s christened forename, the ill-fated Madame X. J is also for judge, jury and executioner     ·     Kneeling, sitting, stooping, lying, leaning, standing, resting. These are the poses Hungarian photographer André Kertész captures, the huddled and improvised position of bodies when immersed in the act of reading. ‘The child who reads’, John Berger notes in his introduction to the collection On Reading, ‘runs panting into the next mystery; the old man remembers. But both of them travel.’ Your letters have reached me. Sitting here, elbows on desk, back hunched, I glide from one word to another, from one world into another; your letters transport me     ·     Letters are addressed but rarely, if ever, titled. A person’s name or title performs as the overture. In this minor act I direct my letters to face a certain person, they are my imagined reader, I am speaking straight to you: you are positioned as the recipient or else you become the transgressive onlooker. Formal greetings or informal sincerities might follow, otherwise letters begin with a gasp, a deep intake of breath. Moyra Davey’s “mailer” works are photographs she has folded, fastened at the edges with brightly coloured rectangular tape, addressed and posted. Eventually arriving at their destination, they are spread out flat and adhered to a wall. The paper, a fragile material, is scuffed and marked; some lightly, other sheets acutely reveal the bags, the hands, the pockets, the letterboxes they have passed through, an unseen postal network documented on the surface itself and scored into visibility. I saw the artist’s series Skeletal Buddha in a South London gallery in my son’s first year. Her unfolded “letters” contained close-up photographs of letters in the world, As and Bs and Cs captured from printed pages, covers of books and alphabets cast in metal. Hung in alphabetical order from left to right, and spanning three walls, I walked along its linear line with my son held close to my chest. Asleep, his small breaths moved in and out, the expression of life felt rather than heard; he could not yet speak, or read, but participated with the rhythm. The selection of letters in front of me were full of the contextual notations impressed through the act of dispersion: microscopic traces of intent and usage, all the wear and tear, the imperfections left by their mode of production and the scars inflicted by man and machine in their delivery. In that moment, I felt an eager yearning for the conversations I would come to have with my son, our future correspondences together, the natter and chatter of speech newly delightful and delighting. I think of his exposure to language, to its systems and order, its accuracy, its profound usefulness matched in equal measure by dent of imperfection. Was my want to speak to him a desire for him to understand my words, my mode of address? To contrast my fear of what a gesture, a look or a written tone might not convey? To bridge the ambiguous gap of understanding where messages fail to arrive at their destination Can Henri Chopin be correct in his prognosis when he writes ‘Prisoner of the Word is the child, and so he will be all his adult life’? Are we captive to definition, plagued by terms and delivery, beholden to lingual patents and patters? Is language a lighthouse, wracked by rough seas? What of the parent and the child? Unlike Davey’s exposed letters, my son’s language did not yet bear the battery of time: open and unmediated. He now talks and, if asked, may respond, incongruously, ‘I am me, you are you’ or ‘one sec daddy, pasta, hot!’     ·     Numbers are single symbols representing word-terms that designate quantity. Roman numerals are letters as numbers, an expanded but ergonomic system of seven alphabetical characters that, by design, turn readers into elementary mathematicians: letter sums with a logic of chronological summation. For example, XIV: the value of that letter is combined with the sum of this and that, this precedes that therefore this is subtracted by that to equal this, which is now added to that to make this. Fourteen. Written language, it is understood, is predicated on counting, born from a need to maintain records to document the exchange of goods, to chronicle human commerce     ·     O is a circular sign known as ‘Aspirate’ in Alexander Bell’s ‘Complete Table of Radical Symbols’ from Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics, a set of physiological articulations locating how sounds are produced by the mouth. In his schematic, O represents an articulation made with ‘the throat open,’ the phonetic “h,” a consonant found in “hop” or “horizon”     ·     Palms reveal much, their surfaces lined with folds, fleshy patinas cracked and holding. Their elemental mapping, like a postcode, locates information within the linearity of what is told and untold, depicted and inscribed. Sam Dolbear’s expansive book Hand That Touch This Fortune Will: A History and Theory of Hand Reading, which you, S, published, attests to this intricate fabric. Dr. Charlotte Wolff, the book’s multifaceted subject—photographed by Man Ray—examined, studied and analysed the hands of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Duchamp, Aldous Huxley, Antonin Artaud, to name but a few.  Dr. Wolff made handprints of some: greasy copper oxide impressions of downturned palms, pressed firmly against a white paper, the right and the left—the recto and the verso—side-by-side, each a ‘crystalline record’—or a personalised letter—bearing the “author’s hand” can be read, interpreted and ‘integrated into a semiotic system of fate and character’     ·     Quills, as you say, are large wing feathers lost in flight. My history teacher told us that the Roman god Mercury, with his petasos, a winged helmet, created the alphabet upon observing the movements birds cut against the sky. Scribes, knife in hand, trim the tip of found feathers in preparation for their own lingual aerodynamics. The clipped v-shaped nib activates on touch with the paper, the quill’s hollow shafts a ready carrier for the oily oceanic inks you so vividly described. Exhausted almost as quickly as the ink’s explosive release by the cephalopod from which they were extracted, the empty nib lifts from its surface and returns to the inkwell, barely a sentence completed. Scribing in brief movements, the flow of words are broken, stopped. An instrument from the air, the quill forces pauses to thought. The animated line of thinking halted, lacerated. Roland Barthes used a ‘fine’ fountain pen for the space it afforded him to pause in thought. This is a control exercised by the user, not imposed by the tool. As an engineered evolution to the quill, Barthes preferred the fountain pen over the ball point pen, a conventionally disposable device that was, in his own words, inferably accustomed to, ‘churning out copy, writing that merely transcribes thought.’ Unlike continuous unfiltered speech, writing by hand takes advantage, he believed, of the distance between the ‘hand and head’. ‘Its slow pace,’ he noted, ‘protects me: I have time to dangle the wrong word from the tip of my pen, the word that “spontaneity” never ceases to generate.’ Habit affords a seamless pace to motion. A fluency where writing aligns with the arrival of thought like the immediacy of speaking, but, crucially, with the space and time for measured intervention: conscious thinking that can override unconscious automation. In this bodily relationship the mind and the pincered fingertips holding the pen are commensurate components, each muscular and neurological action contributing to an expression gestured in form. My handwriting gives a texture to the text that belongs to me, a signature practiced and affected in loops and scrawls, exposing, as Barthes concludes, ‘the hand that presses down, traces, and moves’ and brings into focus, ‘the body that strikes.’ Anne Carson recently spoke to this, to the presence of the body in handwriting and the presentation of self and selfhood visible in its material nature. ‘I think of handwriting,’ she begins, ‘as a way to organise thought into shapes.’ Carson’s shapes no longer perform like themselves, her own strokes newly ‘bend or break or go in all directions’ as her Parkinson’s takes hold. She writes that handwriting is ‘your brain and your brain is you,’ and the self she once recognised in the mannerism of her lines is altered, stuttering uncontrollably. ‘The hand,’ she reconciles, ‘seems in fact all too muchme.’ Perception of oneself verses our unknowable reception. The control instilled in authorship is relinquished when our letters are sent, we bow vulnerably to the mercy of our reader who sees us in body and spirit: please ignore this shameful bird scratching that holds my mind and flesh. Winged words have taken flight; fluttering, soaring, calling     ·     Recollections take root in letters, connections unearthed from the mind’s dense soil by touch, sight or sound. Prolific letter-exchanger and founding member of the New York Correspondence School, Ray Johnson, whose own correspondence was filled with personal asides and ephemeral intimations, uses his own ‘psychological testing game’ as a mnemonic shovel. Speaking to camera in a documentary on his life, Johnson, mildly coquettish, recalls a time with two friends when a musician’s name alludes him. Then, in the moment of filming, he proceeds to word-associate through the alphabet, starting at A and working his way from ‘brown to Canada to dog to English to French to German…’. Reaching Z without finding a root-remembrance, he returns, with a smile, to the beginning, back to A. Immediately a sensory trigger, ‘Al Green!’ : ‘A letter always suggests a word,’ an aide-mémoire conjuring and uprooting memories and people sunken deep in the dirt. ‘But baby, please remember’     ·      Space around the letters is just as important as the dashed marks on the page. Negative space is the counterpart giving form to the elaboration of lines, scribbles, curves, flicks: ‘ink is the colour where you are not’. Space between words gives us sentences, paragraphs, passages. Space is not blank, ‘it is,’ as Rosmarie Waldrop affirms, ‘the locus of fertility’. Space separating representation and recognition is the difference between understanding and a bump on the head. Words come tumbling down: crash, bang, wallop. Waldrop again: ‘all resonance grows from consent to emptiness’. Space between the written and read, spoken and heard, furnished and seen, is naturally assumed to be silence, but ‘the gaps in the absence,’ Waldrop tells us, ‘is the connective tissue,’ and this is the moment of ‘consciousness,’ of creation. And ‘what silence requires,’ John Cage offers in the opening to Lecture on Nothing, a treatise full of pauses and spaces, ‘is that I go on talking’     ·     Trees are ideal surfaces for inscribing missives: lovers’ names entwined by a heart; shepherds identifying territory; warnings to those who stray from the wooded trail; initials tied to dates, letting one’s presence be known. These are rooted correspondence to unknown recipients, letters that never leave their spot, notes noted. Anglo-Saxons carved symbols in bark tablets to exchange messages. It is thought, by some, that the word “book” etymologically derives from the Old English bóc, denoting “beech-tree.” Roots can be found in books, metaphorically and molecularly. Felled, shredded and pulped, the codex, Latin for “tree trunk,” sprouts new leaves that forest and fertilise the library shelves as public records (liber, “inner bark of a tree”)     ·     Underwear, hair, petals, tokens, mementos, gold and clay drop to the floor, sliding from the paper’s creased folds, floating or crashing upon descent. Letters may be filled with litter. Letters in their piling up become the litter, ‘merely a dam against the spring tide of memories.’ Word heaps, surging. ‘The letter! the letter!’ No. ‘The letter! The litter!’, as pleaded by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake     ·     Verging, but never facing. Invariably we’ve skirted around the subject, now it’s here in front of us, behind and above us, even. As I read your letters and sat with the scenic postcards you included, this image, a thickly cut etching, was one that came to mind—the skeletal corpus of death that hovers forbiddingly over Sir Thomas Browne’s sunken body as he writes at his desk, quill clutched, feet planted on the hard ground. Death’s torch lights the way with an outstretched arm, its long bony fingers embracing Browne’s own writing hand, consoling, guiding, coercing, watching. The looming external blackness is thick outside beyond the open window frame. The writer, the subject, the reader and the subjected. Stylistically and representationally different, wildly so, there are similarities between this image and your postcards that lie abstracted in the inky blackness. To me, Browne embodies an earthly plain of horizontal liveness: his actions are determined and tangible, he is alive and knows, and is knowable. Death is present, leering overhead but out of direct sight, understood as mere theory but never comprehended as experienced first-hand. In your images, the land and sea remain visible, but the sky overhead is erased and concealed from view, coated in jet black inky brushstroke. In them, all that is above—the unknown vastness that hangs beyond the horizon line, anything that is not tethered or solid matter, not mortal—fades towards darkness. Through absence a presence is made known, but what occupies the space left cannot be defined with any surety. A fragile but declarative seam divides knowable and abstract thought, slitting the corporeal from the heavens and the skies above. Here, earth—the ground that keeps us grounded—is life and all else is revealed in death, redacted until that moment of passing · Were your letters chosen by you, or did they choose you? As I read your words, the typeface in front of me presents itself, the text’s graphic appearance, its contrasting thick and thin strokes, sharp and hefty, draw my attention to its style, its fashion. Not to the ‘spumy waves,’ but to the brittleness of these robust letterforms. They are like classically styled columns, uprights silhouetted against a nothingness. These are romantic, statuesque Latin types born of the eighteenth century, more drawn than written. I am reminded of a Susan Howe line a friend, A, shared with me: ‘font-voices summon a reader into visible earshot.’ The cacophony of voices speaking, resonating from the hushed spaces of a library’s collection rendering in Howe’s eyes / ears. Language becomes visible: I hear you, I see you. I apprehend the marks, patterns, shapes and gestures. A tone of voice emerges, a character established from individual characters. Somewhere I once read that the down-up-down-up of the letter W—scritch scratch, scritch scratch—represents a saw, a bracket, a tooth and, elsewhere, a pair of ears. Its shape, and indeed name, ‘double U,’ unites two letters together, two Us combine to form a whole; you and you, me and you, you and me, each directly addressing the other, a pair of ears united in listening. This one symbol might epitomise all letters—mouth, voice, sound, support, cut, bite, separation, unity: the zig-zag line of connective communication     ·     X marks the spot. Indeed it does. Two slashes, forward and back, cross in the middle. X is the lover’s signature, X for the kiss of death, X multiplies, X for the missing, X a vote of confidence, X is incorrect, X is explicit. X, as an earlier letter of yours tells me, is for the anointed ones. Xs appear throughout in different guises, demonstrating and speaking volumes without sounding a word, voiceless but expressive     ·     Young boys were once employed and deployed as telegraph messengers. Urgent missives paid by the letter, wireless correspondence sent as signals, coded and decoded, transmitted and transcribed, typed and delivered by small hands, by innocent, salubrious hands seeking an exchange     ·      Zero, we were always headed here, to the end of our sequence. Roman numerals do not account for zero, for 0 cannot be counted. There is no accounting for the unaccounted for: to be chalked off, there must be something, a single unit of measure, a value worth ascribing with a symbol. Zero has no quantity, but it is a quality. It is blankness, a black hole, an unknown nothingness, the point towards which we stare. Nulla. So where from here? Back to zero?

Signing off and holding in mind, the quill, the pen falling, the natter and the chatter, the hand that presses down, the scritch scratch, scritch scratch, the connective tissue, the lexicon of Xs, the litter and the letter.

Abcedmindedly,
your correspondent,

M.        x

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Order Kivland’s These are addressed to you
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Love Letters from Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland—the
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Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, an editor and publisher. Her novel Abécédaire was published by Moist Books in 2022, and its counterpart Almanach: A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar was forthcoming from Grand Iota, 2025. A novel, Her Discourse—a companion to the Tenement Press publication of Envois, will release with JOAN, 2025.

Matthew Stuart is a typographer, writer and lecturer based in the UK. He co-runs/edits the independent press/irregular journal Bricks from the Kiln and has organised events and exhibitions internationally. He has previously published work and writing with Amalgam Journal, Are.na Annual, Strings, Prototype and If A Leaf Falls Press.

Bricks from the Kiln is an independent publisher of books, editions and a somewhat yearly journal. Co-run by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister between the UK and US, and founded in 2015, its output is largely concerned with explorative yet critically minded forms of writing and language sitting at the intersection of art, design and literature.

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