How convenient would it be to live in a cottage
next to a cemetery? After all, unfit for all those ghastly
conventionalities of days of yore as you are, it’s your choice
what matters to you, so you should never deny yourself
the simple pleasure of inadequacy just because a bench plaque
would be the only befitting abridgement of your meagre existence
after wandering through life at the speed of the alphabet.
As a creature of the word, I could imagine the alphabet as something that shapes my world.
And yet, before I learnt my ABCs, I encountered numbers, albeit in a rather selective manner.
It was the church nave where I first heard triple six uttered in a grave voice
by an old man in a peculiar outfit speaking from the ambo. Only much later did I learn
that the trinity he also mentioned means three, although ten turned out to be the real challenge
brought on by the catechism lessons, which also introduced me to the significance of seven.
Of course, this happened after I went to school and learnt numbers in a more structured way.
But neither catechism nor maths classes were as fruitful in this regard as the playground,
where a fist taught me the difference between one and zero.
If I taught myself musical notation, would I be able to write music even though I can’t play any instruments? One might say, What a completely ridiculous idea—it’s like asking if, once you learn the alphabet, you could write Long Day’s Journey Into Night, In Search of Lost Time, or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But is it really? I know, I’m not a bloody Shakespeare, and I wasn’t suggesting that I would attempt to write a new Hamlet. The thing is, there are times when melodies come to my mind, and I hum them to my internal pleasure, but they are gone soon after. If only I wrote them down to be able to come back to them at a later time, who knows what they might evolve into? After all, even though I’m not even remotely close to being at the level of T. S. Eliot, I managed to write a few fairly decent poems. Of course, assuming I don’t have dysmusia.
Not that I am being overly parsimonious,
but is not our alphabet somewhat extravagant?
Why not emulate the Rotokas’ twelve letters?
I am sure they can still construct the whole
of human knowledge out of them.
hidden pilcrow 