letters make words make strings of words which may or may not have meaning depending on the reader or the writer or the world

(This bird and this tree are made of Arabic words and come from a book I'll talk about at the end of this post.)

I have been fixating on this idea:

"There is, they said, a good deal of evidence suggesting that at the deepest level of reality, time as we are accustomed to it does not actually exist, that we live in an eternal present. If I can comprehend it at all, this idea is not a very comfortable one."

This is a quote from Lydia Davis, paraphrasing a radio show she heard in her preface to The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal (New York Review Books, 2002), a brick of a book I have been carrying around for a few weeks and finally finished. Davis is trying to say that through his "strangely fragmented, digressive, and yet beautifully structured psuedonymous memoir" Stendhal achieves a sort of eternal present. Maybe she's right. He certainly approaches something unique and wonderful and strange. But I am fixated on the idea that the future and the past do not exist, that we live in an eternal present. I mean, I know carpe deim and all that but really who doesn't spend their days thinking about things that have happened and looking forward to things that may, or planning for them or deciding how to avoid them? But this isn't the point I see Davis nearing here. Rather, to my mind at least, she is saying that everything is the present moment, including those memories and those future plans. And the physical, actually-happening world is merely part of all that. Then how to account for change and the piling of days, one after the next? I'm not sure. Perhaps something like: a new present moment every infinite moment and no definitive way to order or define so go at it if you need to. I'd suggest art. Or other actions that make time feel different, like falling, or cooking, or talking, or sex, or skipping, or going to a new place, or tether ball, or substitute teaching. Anyway, it's really about letting go (of ego) and the dissolution (of structure) or something.

But I digress. I was trying to somehow get to Cairo, an earth-shattering city where I was fortunate enough to live for about nine months between 2004 and 2005. I met some life-altering folk through a job I had at a gallery there. I was a stranger in a strange place among people who thoroughly delighted and also comforted me. Two of those people were young German graphic artists Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma. Those months I had the pleasure of sharing the eternal present with them in Cairo they began a project which seems to have come to some fruition presently. They've been working intensely on and are soon releasing Arabesque, a book about modern graphic design, illustration, and typography in the Middle East. I'd encourage you to check out the Arabic-inspired Latin fonts they created (click on "the fonts"), as well as some photographs (click on "gallery") they took in Cairo, which give a clue as to their inspiration. I'm damn impressed.