THE LETTERS: An Introduction

by Andrew Alleman

It’s become popular to believe that we are all connected to each other by six degrees. This global synthesis, a failure of mathematics, allows us to indulge the ludicrous notion that a poor African child is ‘connected’ to the Queen of England, via the chance coincidence of even brief acquaintance. The odds are truly staggering. Taking this as a test study, I have performed a detailed analysis, and found it wanting...

Rather, I believe (and I am not alone), that we are connected by letter type, and by their prevalence in words used by us and about us. Thus we are predestined to be one of twenty-six types. The closest analogy is, obviously, personality type, also designated by letter, but here it is presented in expanded form.

Letters cannot be assigned by, otherwise life would be a popularity contest (which happens soon enough); letter types do not denote superior genes. There is, albeit, an occasional synchronicity between character and given name, but the frequency of this determination is low. They are not immediately apparent. They are like benign growths which congeal around the individual like a shroud. Common language, or the characters that define us, define our innate human character.

To find out who you are, simply determine the most frequent letter in your life. Now, having stated this, I must also wish the reader good luck. It is not an easy task; self-deception, ego, and wishful thinking clouds the path. I, for instance, exhibit qualities of Z, F and N(see brief, informal descriptions below), but, after many years of contemplation in my dimly lit boarding room, have reached no penultimate decision...

Some have postulated that punctuation also has a place in the pantheon, and while I deem this worthy of consideration, these grammatical niceties are a relatively recent, and somewhat artificial, invention, not unlike a black rose or a labradoodle. I would consider, for instance, the person who expresses nothing pleasant nor sour, who only exists, like a semi-colon. Such a person has a humanely valid, if dull character, but my complaint with the Punctuationists is that there is still a letter which better projects this person’s interior. In any case, punctuation is beyond the scope of this essay.

But permit me a moment of digression, as I picture for you my version of the origin of the lettertype.

Intensely isolated and freely searching, our earliest ancestors inherited unfathomable mysteries, not unlike amnesiacs who awake in strange places, with no reference points for living. It is only technically true that creation mythologies grew out of this experience. Aboriginal mythology was a community experience, and, in the beginning, there was no community. It was not for many eons that the ur gained expression. The sun warmed and blinded, the stars seemed almost to speak, but they cocked their heads like undomesticated animals: there was sensation, with no understanding. Nestled in hollows beneath stones at night, they lived in perpetual ignorance, which is not unlike silence. In this sun-baked abyss of time, man had no personality; all was sameness.

At first, all was mystery, mystery and survival. They roamed the earth, searching for food, and fearful of becoming it. Their first sound-reference points were inarticulate gruntings, squealings, keenings, roarings: sounds of terror and territory; they lived in and walked through limitless tracks of scratching forests and rustling plains, they witnessed burbling waters; but they did not name them.
There were chance meetings with others of their kind, which initially ended in mayhem and death, but gave way to wary, distant surveillance. Then perhaps the slain animal, which could not be eaten and defended simultaneously, pried opened open the tribal door, as hominids feasted on opposite sides of a carcass.

Later, our ancestors crouched at large, communal, and vaguely communicative, tar pits. Their language was still crude, still centered around terror and territory, but it was progress: at least they were on speaking terms. They were now used to the cycle of the skies. The stars made more sense when they spoke. It began to be understood that the sun provided direction and warmth. Simple concepts, like ‘over there,’ or ‘that way,’ or ‘man, that thing is hot,’ crept into their dialogues.
One fortunate unknown witnessed lightning give birth to fire, via a tree in a barren landscape. He (or she) managed to carry a limb to his tar pit. Others gathered ‘round as he jabbed at pieces of tree with his fire-stick, trying to replicate what he’d seen. Exhausted and confused, he set his fire down on his pieces of tree, and watched with the others in amazement as the fire grew larger. Another stick was used to clone this phenomenon. Soon the tribe was running about, setting fire to their world. Nothing, however, worked quite as well as their tar pit. Its circumference was nearly fifty feet across, and when it lit up, amazement turned to horror: they ran like hell. From (very)far away, they watched the other, smaller, fires go out, and cautiously returned to their ring.

The fire burned eternally. The night, typically dreaded, was now a forum of semi-mystical evolution. There was a new spirit in the world. They shared food more easily. They learned to cook, even developing a mean proto-chili. They were warm beneath the stars.

The fire emanated a glow of security, yet, at the same time, they were cowed by it; it seemed to demand complete mastery of them. They sought ways to describe this to each other, but of course, could not. The fire whispered to them, and what it said entered them like code.

‘A is a strident leader, focused, a carrier of responsibility, a maker of great claims and a fabricator of hoaxes...B is voluptuous and brassy, yet suggesting cerebrality, on a sliding scale. The most desirable of the plosives, she runs out of things to say quickly...C: a character actor, the loyal friend. passionate, embraces change, nuance. D: male model: dumbass, demanding, democratic, drunk, dick. supermodel: dull, undecided, delicious, diva. There are more male models. While not the most attractive letter, E is an actor, for his/her ability to extend, to reach out. Musically, an opera singer. F is a comedian/director. G is studious, active. Spends a lot of time with Is and Ns. Enigmatic H is brawny but expresses ur-concepts: death, birth, ethical, psychological, mythological. I, the most pious of the letters, and easily the most boring. J, everyone’s best friend. K: a professional athlete, or at least a very defensive person. L put its best foot forward and is possibly the most elegant of the letters. M is an architect or a builder or a mathematician, a Euclidean descendant. N struggles with bad tendencies like pessimism (lacking a healthy dose of O) and coveting, but is a team player and has an impossibly tender underside. The aforementioned O, the most well-rounded of the letters, whose pedigree extends in every direction. P, outspoken, political, prolific, professional. Q is a champion of manners and form. R is a multi-tasker, on its toes all day; possibly an athlete. S is sensual and filthy rich, also turned over many times, like crop earth, or old money. T is distant and bureaucratic, expresses order. U is cerebral and contemplative. V wants you to give, and it wants you to hurt. W, a split personality, focused upward and downward simultaneously, and more downward than upward (The opposite of M). Possibly amoral with psychopathic tendencies. X: even weirder than W, X negates your existence with a piercing gaze. Then Y, praiseful, and analytical, possibly the greenest of the letters, and Z, which works at cross-purposes.’

This is by no means an exhaustive lettertype description. Like DNA, the lettertype code is still being intensely studied. Yet all qualities of the human are captured in The Twenty-Six. The pious priest, the generous teacher, the visionary frequency of the poet, the musician, the explorer. A playful Pan, a meddling cupid. The maiden, the mother, the mistress. The merchant, the mariner, the farmer. Those whose goal is pleasure, others who deal only in pain. Some who are glue, and others who divide.

The letters have always held rank over the numbers, or The Ten; fire did not whisper them to our ancestors. Only later, with the advent of quantification, did the number matter.

Now some posit that the numbertype’s day approaches like a vampire’s long shadow, that the letter may eventually be replaced by the number as the key character trait. I understand that in future we may live in corporatized socialism, wed to a coldly scientific stat-and-data anti-humanism, but I believe that a person could never be a number. The number cannot express the character of the letter.

Technically, the picture, the image, reigns as the ur-icon in the hardwiring of the brain. It is to primitive images that letters, and hence words, were applied, and to which early man’s character was first identified. Over time, however, everything has become image, and distinguishing our individual iconographies has lead to chaos. The modern individual’s iconography has been severely and increasingly challenged for years, and we are now facing the most serious attacks on our most common icon, the letter. Yet, hopefully, we may have begun to sort the real from the fake. As our priorities sort themselves, our characters will become clear, returning us to closer identification with the lettertype.

What we do know is that they exist.