Alphabet of the Sunflower, and: Alphabet of Sails, and: Alphabet of Naught

121 NORMAN LOCK ALPHABET OF THE SUNFLOWER from “Alphabets of Desire & Sorrow: A Book of Imaginary Colophons” Not so much as a garrison of flies, moiling and darkly mutinous, was there to see Édouard Crespin (lately arrived in Arabia from France to strengthen its Legion against the Mohammedans) pass on the sun’s anvil into sightlessness—this man who had written a scholarly work on the Carthaginians praised for its luminous clarity. At home again in Marseilles, he spent his days penitently drawing sunflowers—emblem of the solar disk that had put out the eyes of one who had allowed his thoughts to drift carelessly to a distant afternoon in Fez where he had chanced to see a woman uncover her face on a rooftop near the medina. Thus, will beauty sometimes preserve its rarity. Toward the end of his life, Crespin wrote a second book—this, in homage to the sun—composed sans paroles and needing no other alphabet but its flower, as a woman’s face might be deduced from the veil that hides it. 122 NORMAN LOCK ALPHABET OF SAILS from “Alphabets of Desire & Sorrow: A Book of Imaginary Colophons” As a rose unfolds its color to the sun, so one day a dhow—its sail, in a fragile accord of shifting wind and ripening light—flamed momentarily into ecstatic being on the Nile in a truce between what fate or chance had arranged for that instant under Egypt’s sky and what the instant threatened to become. Ravished, Si Abdelaziz forgot the prohibition against graven images and drew sails all that night and the next in the room near the river where the boatmen slept. On them, Si Abdelaziz founded a religion glorifying change, whose sign his apostles incised into their chests so that, at the moment of their deaths, they might ascend, as a boat does in a favoring wind, to Luxor—called the Southern City of the Sun. 123 NORMAN LOCK ALPHABET OF NAUGHT from “Alphabets of Desire & Sorrow: A Book of Imaginary Colophons” With pen dipped in iron gall, a trader in ivory wrote of the famine in the Kingdom of Axum (since the 4th century called Ethiopia) where Sheba’s queen had ruled. Illiterate in Ge’ez, language of the Imperial Court, he had made an alphabet of sorrow from his country’s ample forms of naught: husk of grain, insect’s vacant shell, skull of animal impassive as stone—its bone cup emptied forever of light. The merchant (whose name is lost) was murdered in the Red Sea port of Adulis where he had hoped to escape to India on a boat laden with ebony and myrrh. From time’s mysterious ocean, the manuscript was cast up—in Cairo—in a cellar of the Egyptian Museum and found by a historian of the pharaohs’ expeditions to ancient Punt. Expressive of loss, of lack, its characters were later transliterated into the Latin alphabet by Stephen Payne, who had left Ireland in 1847 when the potatoes failed. ...