Writing good out of me worlds better than the old fool's selfie

Julia Kristeva, Robert Graves and a cameo by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In this post I’ll try to connect two writers on the subject of the alphabet.

The key theme is how alphabets by their very mnenomic natures double-down in various lifelines, or directions, one of which is writing and so… —being a writer.
Writing both allows communication and better ways to secret things into code and cult. Stratagems by which a ‘real’ writer conveys their souls while perhaps modestly claiming not to get in the way of a good story. Some fail at the two-step, some don’t.
But I’ll let you be the judge.

In a beautiful essay Julia Kristeva recounts her baptism into the world of letters at age ten. In Bulgaria on the 24th of May each year Writing Day celebrates the alphabet, or rather the Cyrillic line of letters which in Bulgarian is called Azbouk.

“My Alphabet: Or, How I Am a Letter” is the opening essays to Passions of Our Time.

I say baptism because because it is an initiation.

What was the liquid that washed away the older tidemarks of merely awakened? A procession of people carrying a letter each. I guess in alphabetical order. Each letter has a duty, a meaning, a name that the ten-year-old Yuliya magics into a prayer by connecting the letters up by way of these their triplicate duties.

“The word writes itself in me only so the good exists.”

This is worlding. This sentence is a definition of worlding. 

Children do it as much as they play that day away… —into a world. Adults forget the world in the day, by way or adulting along, and blame the real world when they get no credit for all their work.

Another writer enamoured of grammar was the war poet Robert Graves, mostly known these days for his historical novels about the Roman Emperor Claudius. In 1948 his The White Goddess appeared, subtitled a historical grammar of poetic myth.

I read it as a rollicking wonder about three decades ago in the mid-1980s. In 70s-speak it was a concept album, but my sound-track reading it would have been the then two-decade-old early Pink Floyd albums.

One bit that sticks in my head, is Graves’ notion of the tree alphabet, that each letter represents a tree, and the order of these glyphs as letters/trees/months represents the year’s seasons.

Graves then used this scaffold to peer back into the past to undo iconoclastic Classicism and Christianity via “iconotrophic” rescue missions as made by “analeptic thought” (somehow journeying without drugs or shamanic rituals for these altered states into the past paganity). Thus claiming that the actual order of the alphabet was some sort of mnemonic for a prayer to the eponymous White Goddess; a type of glamorous acrostic hack.

Basically, as a Celtic twilight mystic he was doing a:

“The word writes itself in me only so the good exists.”

Both these experiences and lettering efforts are the result of a worlding urge, a moral urge. In a child the world becomes available, once agency is confirmed, and you have a place amongst others. In a poet the worlding over-intensifies into world-building, produces the intellectual fool that Fyodor Dostoevsky hated in himself so much he threw god into the mix to keep some distance from himself. A sort of religiously enforced adulting.

(Unlike many others I have never found Fyodor Dostoevsky’s characters believable and find their self-chosen predicaments grindingly ridiculous. I know some find them humourous, but for me self-hatred as a pot-boiling technique is meh.)

And Julia Kristeva’s Lacanist worlding? I may leave that for another day with the cheap remark that it is not engrams all the way down.

No, they lie only between the fool and the world.

(transference/counter-transference and analysis/inquiry).

Julia Kristeva Passions of Our Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. ISBN9780231171441).

Robert Graves The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. (London: Faber, 1961.)

Fyodor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment == Преступление и наказание (there are many treatments and translations) e.g.  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Crime_and_Punishment

Originally on substack in February 2024.