Fonts and faiths

This post will be something of a curiosity, and I'll state straight away that I'm going to resist the obvious temptation of playing around with font options on the eblogger dashboard in order to illustrate, decorate or indeed obfuscate my text here. But before I forget it, here's the factoid and the thoughts that have followed it: I've been dipping into K-'s new book of 'Fonts and Encodings' with a sort of magpie eye to the glinting curiosity.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer number of fonts and characters available - 64,000 characters; many of them beautiful hieroglyph-type markings which only reinforces the fact that the Latin Alphabet has far from a monopoly of linguistic expression. Cuneiform script, available in Unicode v.5, is quite wonderful, with its delicate herringbone lines constructed in dense micro formations. The samples presented in the book look like the key to something resonant and important: a series of directions to a new earth, criss-crossing the path of the stars, perhaps. It's noticeable how some fonts rely on straight lines and some on curved. Most are a mixture of both with predominance of one or the other but a few are strictly lines - the enigmatic Yijing hexagrams for instance - and others full of loops and roundness.

Then I discovered the write-up of an 'artificial' alphabet from the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century - 'Deseret' , or the 'Mormon alphabet' which was used for English language texts between 1847 and 1869 'and can be regarded as an attempt to isolate the Mormons culturally from the rest of the United States.' 'Let us hope,' K-'s book concludes, 'that other religions will not create their own new scripts, lest Unicode end up full of useless, unwanted alphabets.' I was struck by this and did a bit of subsequent research; other sources suggested that 'Deseret' was in fact one of several 19th century alphabet experiments attempting to encode English language with an alternative, phonetic script, in order to make it easier for immigrants to learn and speak the language. This is a more benevolent purpose if true. Although artificial, deliberate construction in script as in language (thinking of esperanto here) perhaps sets such a system up for a fall.

There's a poignancy though, I keep thinking, obscured by that ascerbic hope that religions will not perpetuate the practice of devising new alphabets in which to enunciate their spiritual vocabularies. Because to me this seems like an understandable, if highly stylised, symptom of the difficulties involved in speaking of, or inscribing, religious experience. The mystical tradition - I'm thinking of Christianity principally though all major religions have echoes and parallels - contains the idea of apophasis - the impossibility of speaking of spirituality and the divine in any language save that of negatives: God is nothing we can define or evoke in our finite, fallible language(s). No language is entirely up to the task, nor arguably any one religious 'language' or system. So why shouldn't a new religion strive, quite literally, to find new ways of 'inscribing' its approach to the divine? A new alphabet, a new encoding, offering a fresh vehicle for the sacred, for revelation, or scriptural tradition. It will in some way fail, of course - but it might shed further light, create further echoes, on what will still remain a mystery. And isn't it human nature at least to try?

I know I'm stretching an idea over a fairly incidental piece of information - Deseret is chiefly another way of writing down English after all - perhaps that's what poets can't help doing, given half a chance. But I would be happy to think that more fonts and codes existed, in all their mystifying, tantalising potential to reveal or direct a new pathway. And a 'font' according to another definition is of course nothing but the provision of a starting point - for the wetting of the head, a promise, a sign.