Following Words When You Don’t Know Where You are Going
Listening to the personality & sound of letters and words
Each letter of the alphabet has a personality, just like the days of the week, at least that’s what I knew to be true as a kid. Who am I kidding, I still think it’s true. I’m just not as tuned into it as I once was.
As I printed and cursived out letters, capital and lower case, over and over again along the solid blue and dotted lines of my Big Chief Notebook (good thing they don’t use those anymore & what’s with the name and the Native American Image on the cover anyway?), I felt and got to know every character. Some letters were more domineering, like Q over U, some were more passive, like S and H, some were loners like Z. And M subsumed N, although N somehow always managed to maintain the upper hand, and L M N O P had a clique that others didn’t get to be apart of. I felt bad for the ones left out.
I’m not as intimate with these individual characters now. I don’t think about them and their unique personalities the way I used to. I’m more tuned in to what situation they create when they get together. What kind of atmosphere do they create? What impact does their collective have on the collectives next to them? Words, little letter villages, have unique dispositions too, that’s what interests me now, how…
