Proof that the Babel story is alive and well

Once, nearly all of the Western World believed something along these lines: the historical truth of the Babel story, the dispersal of the tribes, and the resultant birth of the modern nations and languages. During the 1600s, scores of books were written claiming that this or that nation was descended from the only righteous tribe. What is now very much a fringe ideology was widespread and taken very seriously, and is just beneath the surface of many contemporary beliefs and attitudes. It is part of the foundations of the binary framework so crucial to the operations of our culture, and is almost always expressed with very rigid black-and-white thinking:

"It is an existence that functions in darkness - not in light, in error - not in truth, in unrighteousness - not in righteousness, and in godlessness - not in godliness. The end result of this delusion is the absolute damnation and eternal ruin of its practitioner..." [taken from a post aptly called Babelology]

There is a raw persuasive power to this kind of logic. It's like the crocodile, unchanged and undiminished for millennia. Living here in the City, I fear and respect it.

Cobble Puzzle

Cobbles in the streets laid by hand like typesetting with lead. Printers' proof marks in fluoro. Taken up, reshuffled and relaid at random, like a typetray dropped on the floor.

undemonstrata

This is a small prototype for a series of drawings I intend to make about text, cartography and the city. The creased landscape of paper is covered with fragmented prose about the reading of a landscape. More Sinclair inspired, Situationist, psychogeographical, Joycean mumblings.

This Foundation Stone

I'm reading Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, on loan from AHB. He writes in soundbites, shorthand. Writes of the scurf of abandoned tags and slogans, lateral moraines deposited in sidestreets by the glacial movements of the capital's polity, each graffito a letter in the great unending unreadable name of London, written in its native tongue. The city's language a hydra of tongues, a mouthful of tongues and limestone teeth, a great mute body skinned with a sea of such mouths, silently scrawling over the brickwork with their felt-tipped tongues. A freewheeling fragmentary prose, a pandemic infectious cant cultured in London's feral book trade...

This photo, however, was taken in Bristol.

The Trees of Whiteladies