a collaborative chaos of uncials,
illegible and thus elect.
According to Erdmann
(Arabische Schriftkunst
als Ornamente,
Bonn, 1910)
"Writing is one form of art in general
whose aesthetic aspect is often so
hypertrophied as to neglect
its chief purpose as communication ...
Horror vacui
is of great
influence in the arrangement of signs."
Erdmann is right. The wall cannot be read
as anything but palimpsest,
elemental commands made vacuous
by the subsequent autograph
of those who obeyed them. Writing alone
appears to count, a thousand words worth no
picture, "graphic," as we observe;
the quenched car is so tangled in a scurf
of scribbles (the moving finger
having writ) that waves seem to have broken
over the ravaged and obviously tireless
machine in opalescent foam,
a sea of troubles unopposed, unended ...
Bonnard, who could never leave off
retouching his canvases, would envy
these scaling laminations, pellicles
of self-assertion which has turned
anonymous by superfetation. Here
perhaps our laureate is met,
for these scriveners have made something
occasioned only when no one member
conspicuously functions
in the field - repressed
and
represented
by unspecifiable rinds
and flakes. (How many times we must peruse
