Invisible Ink

Hanging on my wall is an unfinished piece of music that looks like a line graph.

It was intended to be a loose, freely-interpreted piece with a line and dots representing melody. Performers choose whatever pitches and rhythms they want, deciding what they think the line should represent. The lower the line dips, the lower the pitch. And so on, all along its squiggly shape. It's a vague guideline.

This process of "decoding" the line to create music is similar to reading a book: a set of agreed-upon symbols is interpreted to reveal an idea. This process is so commonplace that we rarely pause to think about how amazing it all is, these systems of sharing information.

Sometimes I look at languages I can't read. I admire beautiful symbols that I can't understand—it fills me with a sense of immense possibility. Sometimes blank books have this effect on me as well, that sense of "this could be anything."

It's also fun to sometimes look at things that were not intended as language, interpreting them as though they contained messages: if I chose, I could read the tackholes in my wall as musical notes and sing them. I could arbitrarily decide that the phases of the moon dictate my attire: no pants allowed on a full moon! Why not? Who's going to stop me? I've gone mad with freedom!

Ahem.

Occasionally a certain object or set of objects will speak to me almost as though they are language itself. A few weeks ago, it was a package of poker chips: I felt I needed to buy them. I don't play poker, but the little discs seemed importantly symbolic. So I'm sitting here, pushing the chips around, stacking and sorting them by color, laying them out to form color patterns, trying to get them to reveal their significance to me.

It's strange to look at an ordinary object and sense that your subconscious associates that object with...something you can't quite express. It's a little like knowing that something in your mind is reading over your shoulder, and that creature deeply appreciates the object as a symbol. And you feel it, you feel it, but you can't quite consciously know it.