“ These characters, illegible to hundreds of millions of Chinese, never entirely lost their meaning. Excluded from the inner circle of the literate, the peasantry looked upon these characters without, admittedly, understanding them, but sensing nonetheless that they came from the same place as themselves: those nimble signs, predecessors to the incurvated rooftops, to dragons and theatrical figures, to cloud drawings and landscapes with flowering branches and bamboo leaves….
Henri Michaux, Ideograms in China. Translated by Gustaf Sobin. Michaux points out that for those outside writing’s magisterium, all characters are asemic. And yet they’re alive—alive not only with the power of mystery, but with graphic force, with rhythm, with evoked symmetries in human forms, our lifeworld, and all of nature. Alive with meaning. And beyond signification and denotation, the totemic power of characters lives for the literate as well. It’s been argued that the strokes of Chinese written characters early made reference to human bones. And think of the nineteenth century, the age when the printed word came into its own in mass-produced books and newspapers: men began to dress in black and white, costumed as letters.
