anatomic alphabet
The Athenian comic playwright Kallias produced something known as "The Alphabetiv Revue" in which the twenty-four members of the chorus acted out the letters of the alphabet and imitated syllables by dancing pairs of vowel plus consonant (Athenaios, Deipnosophistae, Leipzig 1887-1890). Persumably, some considerable proportion of the audience at these plays could participate in the fascination and chagrin tracing out alphabetic shapes. (..) In any event, the people to whom such theater appealed were people whose imagination could be seized by the spectacle of grammata taking shape in air as if they were real. These are vividly pictorial imaginations and they evidently take some pleasure in the plastic contours of alphabet. <<
anne carson, from eros the bittersweet
(eben erst gefunden / leichte verspätung)