The Word Alchemist - Friday Flash
He honed his art by practising on an orange. He mastered inserting the scalpel without any projection of juice. Next he learned to incise the webbing from the fruit itself, furnishing a pure citrus without a single pith strand adorning it. Having licked the challenge of the orange, he stepped up his programme by turning his scalpel to slabs of meat. He removed the vestiges of cartilage and ligament that the butchers hadn’t been able to purge. Then he shivered the meat in the leanest of lean cuts, until finally he shaved the meat so fine, he was able to isolate individual cells which he confirmed by mounting them on slides and viewing them under his microscope. He pronounced himself ready.
He took a novel from the Victorian canon. He opened it up at random and set about the page with his scalpel. He worked sedulously to life the words from the page at the tip of his blade. He was the inverse of an ancient scribe filling in the gilt of an illustrated leaf. (Something later in his endeavours he would also render, on a stolen manuscript from a monastery’s private collection he had paid an arm and a leg and a kidney to secure). Eventually he had separated a whole paragraph of words and held them in the palm of his hand. They just lay there inert. He parcelled his fingers over them and brought them up to his ear. They declined to speak to him. They conjured up no divination of their cached lore.
He turned his attention to bisecting flash cards with much the same mute outcome. They imparted no volume. He also applied a pencil over some Gothic letter transfers, experimenting with deliberately not shading a corner here or there, but watching fascinated as he lifted the transfer sheet and saw the heft of the rest of the letter pull and suck the unpressured corner to complete the whole character. He brought his scalpel to the transfer sheet and whittled away the backing film to liberate the sticky letters themselves. Yet still they greedily hung on to their distilled literacy no matter in what order he arranged them.
After gutting volume after volume, tome after tome, he came to the conclusion that the problem was he was dealing with hollowed words. Words that had been applied to their receptive material planes through industrial processes. Of inks and laser print, die cast stamps and polymer tape impressions. These were all far removed from preserving any runic power the alphabet possessed. No wonder the words lay dead on a page like the tombstones of mass graves.
And so he returned to the surfaces from which they had been severed. He examined the pages and the folios. Some still bore faint traces where their letters had lain (especially the illustrated manuscript which still had some flakes of gold ingrained in the mutilated vellum). But they were far from excitation trails or ghostly spoors and yielded him nothing further than the limp letters that had lain in his hand. The surface itself contributed nothing transformative to spark life into the letters once they came into contact with it. He ingested a few of the blank pages but felt nothing. Their contents was not restored to his consciousness in any way at all.
He took some sheets that he had scraped clean of words and ground them up with mortar and pestle. He placed the shards into a retort and added some aqua vitae to dissolve them, stirring furiously, before applying a gentle heat. When the solution was clear, he drew it up into a syringe and injected himself. Still there was no transmutation, no words informing him having been resurrected from their ghostly impressions on the treated paper. This was true even of the ancient papyrus he had liberated from a museum of antiquities in the name of his “academic research”. The parchment was sufficiently archaic as to make him severely ill once it had entered his bloodstream.
He remained undeterred however and when finally able to rise again from his sickbed, he pondered further on the conundrum. The letters themselves possessed no incantatory power, nor the surface on which they were housed. And yet together they engendered a magical creative transfer of energy. Therefore the secret had to lie through their amalgam. He wrote his own words out on some chromatography paper. He wrote the word ‘orange’ in orange ink, ‘black’ and ‘jet’ in black ink, and ‘red’, ‘read’ and ‘rubicund’ in red ink on the paper. Then he added ‘green’, ‘greengage’ and green gauge’ all in green ink and as a control test he wrote ‘yellow gauge’ in green ink too. Then he placed the paper funnels in their solvent containers and sweated them in the vapours. When the process was finished, all that stained the paper were smears of colour separated out into their inky dye constituents. The words were completely lost.
Language was not prepared to yield up its profound essences. The letters embodied no inherent sounds to enflesh them to a reader or auditor. They lay limp and voiceless. The pages may have rustled when he turned them. They even vibrated when he respired through the holes his scalpel had forged, but that was not really equatable to how one read. He could only conclude that this had been an inquiry doomed from the outset. That language was far too tainted and corrupt to ever attain a perfect, eternal form. There was nothing ennobling to be derived from it.
He took a novel from the Victorian canon. He opened it up at random and set about the page with his scalpel. He worked sedulously to life the words from the page at the tip of his blade. He was the inverse of an ancient scribe filling in the gilt of an illustrated leaf. (Something later in his endeavours he would also render, on a stolen manuscript from a monastery’s private collection he had paid an arm and a leg and a kidney to secure). Eventually he had separated a whole paragraph of words and held them in the palm of his hand. They just lay there inert. He parcelled his fingers over them and brought them up to his ear. They declined to speak to him. They conjured up no divination of their cached lore.
He turned his attention to bisecting flash cards with much the same mute outcome. They imparted no volume. He also applied a pencil over some Gothic letter transfers, experimenting with deliberately not shading a corner here or there, but watching fascinated as he lifted the transfer sheet and saw the heft of the rest of the letter pull and suck the unpressured corner to complete the whole character. He brought his scalpel to the transfer sheet and whittled away the backing film to liberate the sticky letters themselves. Yet still they greedily hung on to their distilled literacy no matter in what order he arranged them.
After gutting volume after volume, tome after tome, he came to the conclusion that the problem was he was dealing with hollowed words. Words that had been applied to their receptive material planes through industrial processes. Of inks and laser print, die cast stamps and polymer tape impressions. These were all far removed from preserving any runic power the alphabet possessed. No wonder the words lay dead on a page like the tombstones of mass graves.
And so he returned to the surfaces from which they had been severed. He examined the pages and the folios. Some still bore faint traces where their letters had lain (especially the illustrated manuscript which still had some flakes of gold ingrained in the mutilated vellum). But they were far from excitation trails or ghostly spoors and yielded him nothing further than the limp letters that had lain in his hand. The surface itself contributed nothing transformative to spark life into the letters once they came into contact with it. He ingested a few of the blank pages but felt nothing. Their contents was not restored to his consciousness in any way at all.
He took some sheets that he had scraped clean of words and ground them up with mortar and pestle. He placed the shards into a retort and added some aqua vitae to dissolve them, stirring furiously, before applying a gentle heat. When the solution was clear, he drew it up into a syringe and injected himself. Still there was no transmutation, no words informing him having been resurrected from their ghostly impressions on the treated paper. This was true even of the ancient papyrus he had liberated from a museum of antiquities in the name of his “academic research”. The parchment was sufficiently archaic as to make him severely ill once it had entered his bloodstream.
He remained undeterred however and when finally able to rise again from his sickbed, he pondered further on the conundrum. The letters themselves possessed no incantatory power, nor the surface on which they were housed. And yet together they engendered a magical creative transfer of energy. Therefore the secret had to lie through their amalgam. He wrote his own words out on some chromatography paper. He wrote the word ‘orange’ in orange ink, ‘black’ and ‘jet’ in black ink, and ‘red’, ‘read’ and ‘rubicund’ in red ink on the paper. Then he added ‘green’, ‘greengage’ and green gauge’ all in green ink and as a control test he wrote ‘yellow gauge’ in green ink too. Then he placed the paper funnels in their solvent containers and sweated them in the vapours. When the process was finished, all that stained the paper were smears of colour separated out into their inky dye constituents. The words were completely lost.
Language was not prepared to yield up its profound essences. The letters embodied no inherent sounds to enflesh them to a reader or auditor. They lay limp and voiceless. The pages may have rustled when he turned them. They even vibrated when he respired through the holes his scalpel had forged, but that was not really equatable to how one read. He could only conclude that this had been an inquiry doomed from the outset. That language was far too tainted and corrupt to ever attain a perfect, eternal form. There was nothing ennobling to be derived from it.
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