Dirt Against Glyphs -- jim leftwich

Dirt Against Glyphs -- jim leftwich

America is opening its calendars to the doorless music. With over two frothing aesthetics, the pizza was great and greasy, from the low arcades of our American Avenue. ​I was making a living delivering souvlakis and cheese steaks to the college students. I would get home from work around 3 in the morning. We lived out in the woods, south of Charlottesville. A dirt path led from the parking area to the porch. I would draw or scrawl or write or scribble with glue sticks on​ sheets of printer paper. Slowly, epic magazines encroach on an asemic fire. Insidious finagle nudges either pox or pax.

The basic ingredients of dirt are clay, silt, loam, and sand.

Glyph
a symbol (such as a curved arrow on a road sign) that conveys information nonverbally.
A glyph is a symbol — it can represent a word, letter, or number, and it can also be a mark that tells you how to pronounce a letter.
any kind of purposeful mark
a picture or symbol that represents a word, used in some writing systems,

​Ostensibly verbal quotation marks. A magnified map of mud on film. Small red ants in incessant motion are an incurable illness of light. A bottle of hats limp on a floatless boat.​

Giant octagonal typhoons. Several slow syntaxes hovering over an exemplary evening. Everyone has a hunch of glue.

Dirt, from Drit

​drit n.
​Forms

​drit n. Also drite, dritte & dirt(e, dird, dert, durt.

(a) Excrement, droppings; dung; feces; (b) hunt. the dung of certain animals; (c) cattes ~, dove ~, gandres ~, gotes ~, hors ~, mannes ~, mous ~, swines ~.

2.
(a) Mud, dirt; ~ of erthe, ~ of the strete; (b) in place names

3.
Fig. (a) Something worthless or degrading; worldly possessions, filthy lucre; ertheli ~, worldli ~; (b) something vile or sinful; sakke of ~; (c) ~ carl, ~ cherl, a worthless fellow; ?one who hauls or spreads dung; also as surname; (d) the develes ~, the Devil's filth; -- used in imprecations.

We went to the shore near Salvo on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I took some glue sticks and some printer paper out to the beach. It was daylight, which made everything different. It was also 9 years later and it was not Virginia. The results refused to satisfy my unrealistic expectations.

The day is a war and the century is its anniversary. Segments and thousands of untrue intelligence, beware the additives of a salient noon. Not an onion. Not a piano. Not Crimea. Not a death's-head-hawk-moth. Not the ancient werewolves with all of their broken spoons.

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03.27.2023

Jim Leftwich, I Should Probably Make Some More

​I Should Probably Make Some More

Jim Leftwich

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They look like they could be (in the present), could have been (in the past), or could potentially be (in the future), the written components of a language -- but I made them myself and I know, that is not what they are.

I was thinking about writing when I made them -- very specifically -- and I was -- with certainty -- not thinking about drawing, and neither was I thinking about something to communicate, with these glyphs being my (failed) attempt at communicating it.

Perhaps I was drawing, even though I was not thinking about drawing. I am willing to leave that, for myself and others, as a possibility to consider.

For what it may be worth: I came to these glyphs as a poet, not as a visual artist. In my relationship with them they are not primarily a part of art history, or of literary history, they are a part of my personal history. As such, they belong to the world of poetry and related matters (but that is only a subjective assessment, from my personal experience and perspective).

I added them to the stock of available reality.

I rescued them from eternal nonexistence.

I let them go, and they are becoming what they will be.

Nonsemic mark-making in the twenty-first century is neither prior to nor post- language. It is perhaps always already in medias res, in the center of the universe (which is everywhere), surrounded by languages in all directions, immersed in the experimentally infinite human moment.

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03.26.2023

jim leftwich -- dirt glyphs

glue on paper, rubbed in dirt, 2002 - 2004, mountainside ct, charlottesville, by jim leftwich

and glue on paper, rubbed in sand on the beach at pea island, outer banks, north carolina, 2011