The Importance of Documental Structure to Asemic Composition

I am surrounded by words. Words spoken and heard, words written and read, words sent and received. Today, email poured into my computer at work, filling it with words I had to sift through. Triage gets me through the day. Meetings, as usual, about documents, about which words to replace with better words, which to keep, which to eliminate. My work swirls around documents and the words adhering to them. We rub the words together to start a flame. We gather around them for warmth. We add sheets of words to the fire. People arrive at my door with half-born words that have been gestating inside of them during the walk to my office. They have been growing into manifestations, yet when they appear as spoken sounds they are half-surprises with unexpected meanings. In the evening, words grow bigger. In a family, you cannot contain words. They are boisterous, unruly, loud. They dance and point and poke. Sharp points of unintentional meaning are encrusted upon their invisible forms, and we cannot touch them without being cut. Words slice through the air, cut through our hearts—yet they rest on the page. I am tired of words, tired of meaning, tired of shapesound letters.

Yet the whole secret of humanness, the whole enterprise of being human, rises from a foundation of language: How we magically exchange meaning: by voice, by letter, by hand. So tonight I am drawn to apparent language, to a magical unsense that we can still somehow read.

My friend Carlos Luis, the Miamian visual poet, mailed me a few pages of asemic writing by Mirtha Dermisache back in December. They arrived, unmarked and without note, in a plain manila envelope. Without titles, without letters, without words. There were two sets of pages, implying that each set was a sequence. On each sheet of paper, I found the most careful and controlled asemic writing I’ve ever encountered.

As I flipped through the pages, I noted that the script Dermisache employed changed to suit a particular piece.

Mirtha Dermisache, Newspaper Text
One script is clean and bright, created out of straight lines and squared-off ovals and triangles. The characters of this script flow together, with few breaks within a line. This opening page definitely resembles the front page of a newspaper. We can make out the title of the paper in dark script along the top of the page. Underneath these we have headlines, text in columns, and a small sidebar. We are comforted by the familiarity of this foreign scene.


Mirtha Dermisache, Newsletter Text
Dermisache has created another script out of a spidery scribble that yet resembles something readable. This script appears on a page that reminds us of a newsletter with a series of small articles, and the headlines for each article appear in a different script, maybe in capital letters. The script of these titles is more open, and resembles handprinting more than cursive writing.


Mirtha Dermisache, Three-Column Sawhorse Text
Dermisache includes one script that changes dramatically during the course of the text, yet its main feature is the black scribble that appears somewhere along the horizontal line of each sawhorse-ike character. The text appears in three columns, but without headlines. What kind of document could this be? Not quite a page from a telephone book and not quite a newspaper page, but suggesting a bit of both.

What Mirtha Dermisache teaches us here and elsewhere is that there are many possible shapes that asemic scripts can take. Many asemic writers (even me) write scripts that too often show too great a debt to Chinese calligraphy and too little imagination towards creating totally new forms. She shows us how to stretch asemia towards that point just before textlessness, the point where writing and drawing are one. She teaches us that the power of asemic works is deepened by their documental structure. These templates for meaning put meaningless text into meaningful context.

Documental structure tells us what we would be reading if there only had been something on the page to read.

Now back to silence, stillness, blankness.

ecr. l’inf.