The first letter came from the body of a beast. Aleph/alif, the seed of many alphabets, began as an ox. Its head and horns were etched into clay not to abstract the world, but to hold the world. That early letter was the origin of a system of structure, and to inscribe it was to anchor meaning to form. As we summon air through our vocal folds and shape our mouths to phonate that most primal letter, we bring forth a world. A universe of potential meaning with every breath.

In the ancient Middle East, the god Enki gave humanity divine pattern-sets called ‘me,’ systems for governance, art and ritual. He was a god of watery knowledge and subterranean flows, of architectural plans and encoded myth. Enki was not a god of thunder or fire, but of design itself. To make something under his blessing wasn’t an act of utility, but an act of magic.

Millennia later, Argentinian author and grandfather of magical realism Jorge Luis Borges would find another Aleph in the basement of a Buenos Aires home. His Aleph is a singular point in space-time containing all other points. A spot where all places, stories, and images could be seen at once, paralyzing in its clarity. Enki gave his people the blueprints of reality, and Borges reminds us that behind every glyph is infinity to be unfolded.

To imagine at all and give something form is to step into this lineage, and to world-build now is to work within what I call mutant systems. Networks shaped by pressure, reconfigured by constraint and ever-evolving despite potential rupture. To be an artist, maker, thinker today is to prototype possibility with the materials at hand, within these transitioning systems, through memory, grief, joy, confusion, distortion, clarity, rupture.

"There are more futures than we’ve been sold, and to remember, synthesize and create is to deviate. To inscribe is to unlearn and to create is to disobey, and as others decorate empire, we create prisms to shine new light through."

By learning the past, we design portals to what’s next. So we return to the aleph/alif, not only as letter or a cosmic point of spatio-temporal folding, but as reminder that a new timeline that begins at every single moment for us to inscribe onto the world. 

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©Adam Garcia
FRIDAY GALLERY