All you have to do is close your eyes, and the inward rhythm passes through your hand with greater purity. [...] The great artist of the Stone Age knew how to ride the thousand voices singing in him. [...] Dreaming taught me how to write, and it was only later, laboriously, that I learned to read. The hands grasp more quickly than the mind.
· Hans Arp, Ant's Harp

Language lives and evolves. In prehistory, language lived in the throats and gestures of animals. But this is before it could remember. Its earliest memory is the wall of a cave. The smell of ochre and charcoal. Lascaux. Cows.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
· James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

It is a long time after that before the memories become clear. Clay tablets, and stone walls. Fingers full of dust and ink. The sound of a chisel against stone, clink clink clink clink. If you say a word over and over, it becomes sound. If you trace a picture over and over, it becomes symbol. Language drew that moocow so many times, it became something else.

Looking back now, Language can't remember the cow's name. But it can remember the smell.

Alphabet is the memory of language. The older language gets, the less alphabet has anything to do with what it meant to remember. Similarly, it forgets where it got most of its words. It flips through a dictionary with a certain detachment, as if looking at someone else's souvenirs. Some mornings it doesn't recognize itself in the mirror.

In the ancient world it was believed that there was an intrinsic relationship between words and their referents, even to the former giving rise to the latter. [...] In an essential fashion, words were what they represented.
· Constance Classen, Words of Sense, from Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History & Across Cultures

Language has aged. But its nose still works. And its ears and its eyes and its hands still work, and its tongue tastes even if it gets tangled sometimes. Its five senses receive the stimuli of the immediate universe as they always have. In the same way, alphabet is old but its vowels still work. Long ago it decided there were five: A, E, I, O, U. They do not always sound the same, but for simplicity's sake alphabet has made up its mind. The ear disagrees but the eye is satisfied.

A vowel is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract; an unconstriction of breath. The word vowel comes from the Latin vocalis, meaning "speaking." Vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables. Without these primordial sounds, words and speech would not be possible (see Wikipedia). Vowels are as essential to language as senses are to living experience. If language is a living thing, vowels are its senses.

In the spirit of Hans Arp's dream-writing, and in light of language's languished memory, I propose an arbitrary analogy: Once upon a time there were five vowels coming down along the road that met five nicens little senses; and a very good time it was.

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.
· Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences

A is for smell. At first this makes as much sense as a Surrealist poem, but the hands grasp more quickly than the mind: turn an A over and over in your hand, pass it from palm to palm. It is the shape of a nose. Its structure is that of an apple-ladder, or a campfire. The aroma of apple-blossoms and marshmallows. An A is a pair of lines pinching a line between them, like fingers raising something to the nose. A has the subtlety and snobbery of smell, a sense particularly associated with memory. A sighs, Ah!, and remembers. It is pointed, like a nose, and likes to lead the way.

E is an ear, its three prongs like the lobes that splay receptively into space, or perhaps like the tines of tuning forks. It is neatly compartmentalized, and its lines seem to yen to continue - the beginnings of a grid, or a musical staff? E is piano keys, or the frets of stringed instruments. The sound of wind over the mouth of a bottle. E says, Eh?, and asks you to repeat yourself, as it repeats itself with frenetic frequency, being the most commonly-encountered letter in the English language.

I equals eye. A closed eye, lying on its side? Or perhaps the iris of a cat, or the eye of a needle. Needlelike, I can be difficult to see at a distance. Is it a plinth, a podium, a pillar? Doric, Ionic, Corinthian? I has a certain Italianness in it, a rich vein of history. In italic, it might be Pisa's Leaning Tower. I elevates, lifts, rises. It has the dignity, simplicity, and quickness of sight. A plume of smoke on a windless day. I is solitary, stands alone, stares you down. I has a certain primacy: I equals 1.

O is the shape of a fingertip, a toe, or the ball of an elbow: something that pokes and prods, exploratory yet vulnerable. O is touch. O is something holdable in the palm of a hand, smooth and perhaps hollow: a tooth, an egg, a heart. O floats. O is skin stretched over a drum, rings on the surface of a pond, a mosquito bite raised like Braille. O can be an embrace or a fist, a womb or a bomb. Oh! It exclaims, in orgasm or pain, and always close at hand.

U is an untucked tongue, a rather rude gesture. Gustatory, guttural, U is taste. Its shape is a cup, concave and capable of carrying something to the mouth. U is crude, and unmannered: it scoops its food, droops and drools, and drops utensils under the table. U is uncouth, as useless as an upturned umbrella, and requires the supervision of Q at all times. The taste of a mouth washed out with soap. Uh! blurts U, usurper, who always wants to be someone else: you.

Crickets, as you know, have taste buds in their toes and ears in their front kneecaps. Typographers are equally bizarre. Their ears are in their eyes; their tongues are in their hands. It is their fingers more than their lips that constantly threaten to move as they read.
· Robert Bringhurst, The Typographic Mind

Drawing an A is a laboured construction, the start of an architecture: to reinforce and connect two leaning lines. Or, more haphazardly, an A can be "a slapdash arc and a backward zag" (from Christian Bök's Eunoia). Open on the bottom, with an enclosed space at the top, it suggests nostrils and a nasal cavity. To draw an E is to nail rungs to a ladder, to build shelves, or to measure off a scale - something abstractly musical. It is open on one side, like an ear. To write an I is to quickly indicate direction; almost an arrow, an I is a compass needle, due north. A line of sight. Another kind of compass traces an O, an enclosed space, like skin cocooning a body. It is circular, like the shape of lips saying: oooooo. To make a U is to quickly change directions, to protrude and retract on a vertical axis, like a tongue; a U-turn.

"I'm not meaning rude, really and truly," said Taffy. "It's part of my secret-surprise-think. Do say ah, Daddy, and keep your mouth open at the end, and lend me that tooth. I'm going to draw a carp-fish's mouth wide-open."
· Rudyard Kipling, How the Alphabet was Made

In Kipling's fable, the letter A came about when Taffimai Metallumai drew a carp's mouth with a feeler stretched across; similarly, it's believed to have evolved from the Phoenician grapheme of an ox's head (see Wikipedia). A dead fish, an ox's nose; in fiction and history, A has its roots in smelly animals. E, more cleanly, began as the Phoenician symbol for home or courtyard (see Allan Haley's The Letter E); the inner chamber of an ear? At I and O, my analogy falls apart; I is the Phoenician grapheme for arm or hand, and O for eye. Visually this makes sense: the circle of O resembles an eyeball, and I an arm or finger. For various reasons described above, though, I prefer my original pairings. And so I carry on with my finger in my eye. The character U originated along with F, V, W, and Y, and once resembled "a giant snake or dragon." A forked tongue? U has always been unruly, and uncooperative.

His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
· James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Five symbols are inadequate to convey the range of sounds that can be produced by pronouncing A, E, I, O, and U. Nevertheless, each vowel has a characteristic pitch. I and E are the highest, associated with whistles and shrieks; this corresponds to the distance associated with the senses of sight and hearing, which can experience things a long way off. A, a more moderate, nasal sound, correlates to smell which requires proximity, but not contact. O and U are more bass sounds, associated with low-pitched noises (think thud, plonk/plunk, honk, boom). This works well with the senses of touch and taste, which require direct contact to stimulate. A degree of intensity is also implied: I and E are sharp, quick, trill; A is more flat, banal; O and U are broader, blunt, somewhat slumberous (could it be because their graphemes have no sharp corners?).

Cross-cultural studies have shown that different vowel sounds are associated with different degrees of size and brightness. Thus one study of English and Chinese speakers in which the made-up words 'mal' and 'mil' were said to mean 'table,' both groups agreed that 'mal' suggested a larger table than 'mil.'
· Constance Classen, Words of Sense, from Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History & Across Cultures

Like vowels, the senses are useful individually but far more versatile when used together. A missing sense is usually experienced as either a disability or an inconvenience, depending on which sense, and there are names for each scenario: blindness (inability to see), deafness (hear), paresthesia (to feel pressure), anosmia (smell), and ageusia (taste). The full range of vocalic sounds involves combinations of vowels, or diphthongs ("a vowel sound that starts near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves toward the position for another"). Language and sensory experience are both enriched when we use vowels and sounds to their full extent; to experience text or the universe otherwise borders on the unnatural.

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks - impish hijinks, which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib?
· Christian Bök, Eunoia

An excerpt from Christian Bök's Eunoia highlights the curious results that can come from constrained writing - in this case, writing using only one vowel. Living with just one sense is almost unimaginable, and might in some ways resemble the text of Eunoia: limited and difficult, inhibited, one-dimensional.

Y is sometimes used as a vowel. Is there a sixth sense? Sometimes equilibrioception is considered so; a sense of balance, of water in your ears. Y is mysterious, almost mythic; the next-to-last letter, comparable to the planet Pluto in its remoteness and demotion as a kind of lesser vowel. Visually, Y resembles nothing so much as a funnel. As an affix, it neatly makes words ambiguous, conveying a vague sense of their unfunneled selves: fish becomes fishy, water becomes watery, push becomes pushy. It makes nouns into adjectives, a kind of orthographic alchemy. Like a path of bird's footprints, Y is apt to abruptly trail off and disappear. Y is shifty, and one is advised not to trust it; like a dowsing rod, no one really knows whether or not to believe in its abilities. Wryly, Y asks the hardest question: Why?

whatever the dream of numbers means
whatever the slumber that is never broken
the spoken word & the written
together end the spell
· bpNichol, Zygal

October 10, 2005; December 20, 2005; August 4, 2006; October 19, 2006.

I've been photographing this trail in Pasadena, Newfoundland, whenever I've been home. Pity I didn't visit sometime between December and August. Not that I missed anything:

Spring is a time of indecision; in fact, there is no spring.
· Peter Scott, The Origin of Newfoundland's Flora

Another attempt to 'translate' digital photographic data into other systems, this time into a kind of paint-by-number. Each colour in the image is assigned a number, and a border is drawn around each area of colour. Since digital photos are made of small square pixels, this more or less creates a grid. The bigger boxes are where two or more adjacent pixels are the same colour (notice the patch of black in the lower-right corner). A key of colours and corresponding numbers is also generated. The example above has been resampled to fit on this website; the generated file is big enough to be printed out and hand-painted. I like that this demonstrates how a digital image is made up, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way. If you had a big enough palette (this image uses 1171 different colours) and enough time, it could work perfectly as a paint-by-number. Again, this was generated using PHP scripting. I'm working with small images for now, as anything much bigger than this causes the script to time out.

The photo was taken in Dublin, and is one of the images included in index of first lines.

Added October 22, 2006: Jeremiah McNichols has written an interesting analysis of my paint by number and index of first lines projects on his excellent blog, Think In Pictures. They were also briefly mentioned on Information Aesthetics and Digital Aesthetics.

Certainly the identity of a photographic image no longer has to do with its support or its chemical composition, or with its authorship, place of origin, or pictorial appearance. It instead comprises, as Müller-Pohle suggests, a pliable sequence of digital data and electronic impulses.
· Geoffrey Batchen, Da[r]ta, from Each Wild Idea

As opposed to an analog film negative, a digital image is essentially a stream of data, and can be represented as a string of ones and zeroes. With a bit of ingenuity, a digital image can be 'translated' into other forms of digital data, such as text. I'm interested in adapting digital photographic data into information systems usually associated with language and literature, such as an index of first lines.

An index of first lines, occasionally found in anthologies of poetry, eschews authorship, title and chronology and lists poems alphabetically according to each first line of text. The idea is that a reader might not always recall the title or author of a poem, but is likely to remember how it begins. I've always found indices of first lines amusing as Dadaist exercises in found poetry - reading the lines sequentially often results in a charmingly garbled, wandering diatribe, full of false starts. An example, from The Oxford Shakespeare:

Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Against my love shall be, as I am now
Against that time, if ever that time come
Ah! wherefore with infection should he live
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth
Alas! 'tis true I have gone here and there
As a decrepit father takes delight
As an unperfect actor on the stage
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st
As it fell upon a day
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted...

index of first lines contains the first row of pixels from every digital photo I took from May 9 to July 17, 2004, during a summer spent studying art history in the U.K. and France. The lines of pixels are stratified in chronological order, with the earliest photo at the top. The resulting image contains 2048 x 1047 pixels - 2048 pixels being the width of the photos my digital camera took (3.2 megapixels), times 1047 photos.

It would have been quite time-consuming to assemble this using digital image editing software such as Photoshop. Instead, I wrote a PHP script to automatically copy and compile the images (PHP is a programming language designed for producing dynamic web pages, and can also be used to generate and manipulate digital images in a systematic way). index of first lines is a product not only of a digital camera, but of computer code - the very act of its creation is an act of reproduction. Thus it is an example of "the work of art designed for reproducibility" described by Walter Benjamin. It is similar to film in this way, and also in that it is composed of a series of sequential images that are never perceived individually. Its horizontal lines can be likened to the lines that jitter across the screen when one fast-forwards a video.

While it's impossible for me to identify individual photos, looking at this image does bring back memories. Its hazy horizontal sweep evokes a landscape seen from the window of a moving train, a suitable metaphor for the fleeting, mesmerizing summer I remember. The 'busiest' areas (with the most contrasting lines) represent hectic days wandering London or Paris, when no two photos were alike. Thicker bands of colour indicate slower times, when I snapped many photos with similar scenery - the greenery of The Gibberd Garden, or a clear blue sky over Brighton Pier. A certain band of white a third of the way down - near the end of the first month - is a trace of the overcast sky on the afternoon I first visited Stonehenge. In this way, index of first lines is an accurate cross-section of my memory, or at least my photographic habits. I read it in the same way I occasionally reread the journals I kept during that summer's travels: not top-to-bottom, but discursively, letting my eyes and mind wander. Nevertheless, examining it is an act of reading.

Robert Frank once said, "When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice." He might have said, "the way they do when they want to pause and rewind a film." index of first lines is full of these small instant replays, from near-identical rows of pixels which indicate a photo taken twice, to my reading of it as a kind of rewound / fast-forwarded version of my summer. Like an index of poems, its usefulness as a reference device depends on my memory. Taken out of context, it has a certain Dadaist quality.

"The still photographic image has circulated [...] predominantly alongside the meanings of the printed word," writes Martin Lister in his Introduction to the Photographic Image in Digital Culture, and "with the emergence of digital technology this convergence is exponentially increasing." Though it can be approximated on paper, index of first lines is not intended for a gallery wall. I'm interested in the possibilities of web-based art and writing, and especially in self-published, ongoing projects such as blogs. It's with the intention of designing my blog that I began to learn PHP in the first place, and it seems fitting to situate index of first lines there, as part of a longer ongoing journal of photographs and writing.

a seagull quill
dipped in tidepool

sips water easily,
doesn't drip, deposits
a clean, oblong line,
brief as breath,
on shoreline stone

saltwater letters vanish fast
in strong lateral sunlight -
traced this three times before it would linger
long enough to photograph,

not long after