motherlode

"We’ve trafficked in an inexact language that must be translated anew. Not even translated. Destroyed. Rebuilt. The call for a new code, new lettering, a way to pass on messages that would bypass the toxic alphabet, the chemically foul speech we now used." p.64

 

"We are in a high season of error." p.67

 

"At intersections the stop signs had been effaced, caked in metallic red paint. Road signs and city distances had likewise been distorted. Most public writing, issuing basic commands to drivers, had been camouflaged. The bright, hammered slabs of road signs still hung from their posts, but they were wordless blocks of color that commanded no action." p.144

"At a county border marked by a heap of rope, a man on a ladder disguised a road sign, adding marks to the letters until they flowered out of meaning. The word looked to have once been Rochester." p.145

 

"After some hours of scrutiny I concluded there was nothing here of any use, just examples from our own alphabet, fattened here and there, rendered so erratic that they looked like the lines of an EKG." p.167

 

"And so my work began, ruling out approaches, touring through the history of letters and alphabets, borrowing liberally from incompatible scripts, inventing new ones, correcting mistakes burned into the old ones." pp.169-70

"I shaped letters with yarn, hieroglyphs with yarn, arranged yarn in the minimal spatter of contemporary shorthand. With a tweezers I laid down a vertical script of yarn, hung yarn from wire so it draped just so, and with jets of air blew the yarn into letter shapes as it swayed. Or so I surmised, for I did not look at the device myself. With yarn I wrote full sentences in the Coptic alphabet, the Indus script, Linear A and B, all proven toxic already, all capable, in blocks and paragraphs, to generate sickness—micro coma, paralysis—in the reader, but then I tugged each end of the yarn on these sentences until the words pulled long. I tugged on the yarn and documented each stage until the yarn was pulled so taut, it stood out in a straight line and could never be mistaken for language." p.171

 

"Rebus writing, rune writing, pictograms...Administrative script, scripts of love, the scripts used to conceal secrets and deflect attention. All of the specialty languages I tried...By design I wrote sentences filled with errors, sentences afflicted with inconsistencies of tense and tone. Sentences of poor taste, good taste, no conspicuous taste at all. Grammatical rules, rules of usage, rules governing rhythm and silence, these I broke hard. I used a conventional Roman alphabet but spelled everything wrong. Would it matter? I tweezed letters from words, obliterated vowels, used only vowels, repurposed a single vowel, O, to stand in for all of them, to give air to the words, a universal breathiness from a single source." pp.183-184

"Of course I tried codes. In modern Roman letters I encrypted a suicide note, some gentleman’s last words, with the Caesar cipher. From there I recreated what I could remember from historical texts—the Gettysburg Address was one—and fed them into simple substitution ciphers, homophonic coding, and a modified Vigenère cipher." p.184