Chapter 4: Eye Lingo

Revolutionize reading and a Revolution of the Word will be inklessly achieved. There have been rumblings of word battles from the eras of Rabelais and Shakespeare through the inarticulate arm-waving time of Whitman down to the deafening present. Creative writers have searched for new forms of word communication, methods of greeting more mental and aesthetic than dogs continue to employ so unimaginatively. Bawling creative Babes in the Word continue their struggle to shatter the filmy caul they were born with and get at the rosy nourishing nipples of their mother, the Sphinxlike Reader. Manifestos have been broadcast in all tongues in all times, dating from the one God issued at the Tower of Babble, which carries on today in the Unknown Tongue by which Holy Rollers commune. Perhaps when we lift our creative writing heads too high again through the unexpected outlet of the Reading Machine God will come along and pie the type and we’ll have to begin all over once more. But until then lets be busy at our Tower.

My reading machine, by its very existence, makes a need for new words and demands the deletion of some worn-out ones. The typewriter key-test of “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party” can be expressed with more interesting optical effect “Nowtime goodmen comeaid theirparty”, or “Timegood mencome aidparty”. No educated reading eye of this age catches the little, useless, conventional conjunctions, articles, prefixes, suffices, etc. unless they are needed for emphasis. The up-to-date eye scarecely sees the “thes”, “ands”, “ofs”, “tos”, “as”, “ins”, “that’s”, “fromits”; it picks out the meaty nouns, verbs and qualifying words so placed as to assume importance; only essential words get over to the practiced reading eye, the bulky residue is overlooked. Useless, unimportant sentence-encumberers will be increasingly skipped and disregarded, until eventually they will not be missed at all by the eager eye in its excitement at witnessing a moving type spectacle, a READIE, performing before its Mind’s Vision and the sensitive Inner Ear.

Already there is a tendency to do away with quotes in the French fashion and useless capital letters at the beginning of columns of poetry. The paragraph sign passed out long ago. All modern movements toward more effective simplicity are in the same sure direction; even the poet laureate of wordbound England at the end of his life has done his bit to loosen up the Language in “The testament of Beauty”.

Let’s see words machinewise, let useless ones drop out and fresh Spring pansy winking ones pop up.

Without any whirr or splutter writing is readable at the speed of the day — 1930 — not 1450, without being broken by conventional columns confined to pages and pickled in books, a READIE runs on before the eye continuously — on forever.

in-a-single-line-I-see-1450-invention-movable-type-

Gutenberg-Wynkyn-de-Worde-Jimmy-the-Ink---

Caxton-though-Chinese-centuries-before-printed

-thousand-page-books-on-silk-leaves-furnished-by--

local-silk-worms-no-two-leaves-tinted-alike----

printing-from-dainty-porcelain-type-same-stuff--

makes-teacups---dreams-Shakespeare-bending---

over-workbench-making-language-laboriously----

bellowing-blacksmith-turning-out-grotesqueries-at-

forge-all-onhisown-to-keep-UP-interest-in-job---

Spenstream-of-lusty-steamy-bigfisted-word-----

moulders-flit-by--------Rabelais-BenJonson-Dan

Defoe-Sterne-WaltWhitman-GertStein-JimJoyce--

Stephen-Crane’s-Black-Riders-Crash-by-hell-bent--

for-leather-uppercase-LOWERCASE-both------

together-chanting-valorously-Print-in-action-at---

longlast-movable-type-at-breakneck-gallop------

Cummings-Boyle-Sandburg-flash-through-daredevil-

commaless-Cossacks-astride-mustang-bronco-----

vocabularies-leaning-farout-into-inky-night-----

picking-up-carefully-placed-phrases-with-flashing--

Afric-teeth--Myself-I-see-motherfather-newscope-

Optical-Writers-running-round-newhorizon-rims--

rhythmically-Eye-Writers-writing-endless-lines---

for-reading-machines-more-optical-mental-more---

colorful-readable-than-books----simple-foolproof-

Readie-Machine-conveying-breathless-type-to----

eager-eyereaders-tickling-Inner-ears-dumping----

Inner-ear-Eyefuls-of-wriggling-writer-right-before-

receptive-ocular-brain-portals-bringing-closer----

hugging-readerwriter-now-there-is-more-mental---

necking-radioactivity-television-readievision-----

going-on-more-moving-reading-more-moving-----

The above is neither telegraphese nor a stab in the dark at writing modernly. It is but a crude attempt to convey the optical continuity of reading matter as it appears spinning past the eye out of a word-machine. It is hampered by the connecting hyphens and columns and lacks MOTION, the one essential of the new reading principle.

With written matter moving before the eyes new forms of expression will develop naturally and surely more expressive ones, at least a technical eye-lingo of the Readie will result. The eye refreshed will ask for more, bawl for occasional tickling, eye-bawl, even tinted paper could be used to help along the flow of words and thoughts; and surely colored lighting effects on the reading tape. One colored strand in the up-to-date binder’s stitching relieves the dull look of a book.

Useless words will go out for a long walk and never come back into the reading language again, they will just walk out, drop out, dim out, fade out — OUT. Writing will recover its earlier naïveté, its art quality; our reading vocabulary will be hygienically circumcised and circumscissiled. For the first time in the history of mental optics there will exist a visual Literary Language sharply separated from the Speaking Tongue. Literary language is Optical, speaking language Vocal, and the gap between them must spread till it becomes a gulf. My reading machine will serve as a wedge. Makers of words will be born; fresh, vital eye-words will wink out of dull, dismal, drooling type at startled smug readers here below. New methods crave new matter; conventional word-prejudices will be automatically overcome, from necessity reading-writing will spring full-blown into being. The Revolution of the Word will be all over but the shouting. Reading-writing will be produced not so much for its sonorific sleep-producing qualities as for its mental-eye provoking pleasures.

I have lived with five hundred years of printed books and have felt the same papyrus that Nebuchadnezzar might have touched, and all this time I have lived in loving wonder, a great want-to-know about words, their here and their there, their this and their that, and the most efficacious manner of administering the written word to the patient. The monks in the beginning didn’t do it so badly in their illuminated manuscripts, they retained a little of the healthy hieroglyphic, all Oriental books in ideogrammatic character are delights, early colophons splendid. But what have we got in this machine age, only Bruce Rogers and more glittering comely type to make into beautifully commonplace words which can’t tell us much more than the labored chisellings of the stone age, beautiful but dumb books as clumsy in their way as the Rozetti Stone.

Let’s let writing out of books, give it a chance and see what it does with its liberty. Maybe beside moths there are butterflies in the core of those cloth-cased cocoons stacked away in libraries. Let them out and have a look. With reading-words freely conveyed maybe books will become as rare as horses after the advent of the auto, perhaps they will be maintained only for personal pleasure or traditional show, as the gorgeously-trapped brewery steeds of Munich. Books may go out of style as pansy parlor paintings did after the camera came along.

Let’s look for literary renaissance through the Readie: a modern, moving, word spectacle. Let’s have a new reading medium in time with our day, so that industrious delvers in the Word-Pile may be rapidly read and quickly understood by their own generation at least.

The Readies are no more unusual than the Talkies, and not a scratch on television. As soon as my reading machine becomes a daily necessity certainly it will be out of date. Pocket reading machines will be the vogue then, reading matter will be radioed as it is today to newsies on shipboard and words perhaps eventually will be recorded directly on the palpitating ether. But the endless imaginative possibilities of the new medium need not lead us astray. The low-brows are presently revelling in their Movies and Talkies while almost extinct high-brow is content to sit at home sipping his thin alphabet soup out of archaic volumes of columns, mewling a little like a puling baby taking mush from the tip of an awkward wooden spoon too gross for his musical rose-buddy temperamental mouth.

Those Obfuscates who can’t make out the Readies on the dim literary horizon of the day will be the first to accept them as a commonplace tomorrow and they will be the loudest in grumbling if anything happens to the readie mechanism to interrupt the eager optical word flow for as much as a billimeter-augenblick.