Once you’ve said A, you can say. Once you’ve said A a sufficient number of times and then B and then… you simply have to go on. You can’t say A P F, for behind A P F there’s a little voice saying A B C, and behind the C there’s the backroom where the rest of the letters are sitting in a row playing cards.

The alphabet is greater than our will. It is the awl of language that tries to dig up meaning from the world. Once you’ve said A, you have to say. One follows the other. No order is random. Everything is ordered, everything is acoustic, everything is contained in the order of the alphabet.

So it is just a matter of assigning a letter to everything in the world. Then it immediately finds its place in an order that ought to exist. Somewhere or other it has to exist, for everything else would be utterly ungraspable. The order could exist in the stars, for example. Look at their order. Their beautiful letters. It is not chaos, for chaos is outside the alphabet; the universe itself is subject to the alphabet, the stars are there to be able to carry precisely this or that letter, and take up the place assigned to them.

The alphabet contains everything. Also the unknown, that which is hard to define. It is given its own letter. X. So there is order in that, too. The incomprehensible has its own place in the great order of priority. Between V and Y. Then that’s been put in its place. The unknown cannot abscond, not even with its long legs that are almost made for running away on, with all the unknown, all the disorderly. But if it should attempt to run, it can always be caught at once. Just say V and it will come of its own accord, wagging its tail like a little dog, and be put in its place.

A, on the other hand, is the beginning. Always the beginning. Always arrival, always order that is established with its long, acoustic sequence.

It is said that Thot created everything out of sound. It is said that he wrote our reality and then placed it within a framework for us, so we could experience it and learn. Without the alphabet we do not understand reality; it becomes visible in the wind of the letter, the order of the alphabet. Without writing we cannot preserve knowledge of our reality, so that we can make use of it later.

An alphabet is many things. It is the order of thought. It is the fixed sequence of sounds. It is not being able to say a thing without also saying a particular subsequent thing. The

alphabet is the framework within which reality is understood; it is the size and complexity of society that determines what that framework looks like.

Here comes the alphabet streaming, look it’s swimming, look, it’s running, it’s pulling itself up by the arms and swinging round the bar, look the alphabets unraveling itself in time.

A is the beginning, but it is also the ending. Give the letter to an object and it becomes part of a higher order. The alphabet lets its authority sprinkle over the things. M is the abbreviation for a man that lost his wife in childbirth. D is a day when the weather is bad, so that is why the D day does not fall on the day that should have been D-day, and D is an event, one that drowns, that is driven, that dies, that makes the V-sign, and even so it rains, it is overcast, reality is chaotic, it rears up like a horse and resists, this day doesn’t want to be D-day but that day, the day whinnies and leaps over the U-Boot, the submarine. Day over U. D-day. The day takes its P-Pill. Makes a V-sign and sticks the M5 up so it hits the G-spot.

Everything’s in order. The alphabet’s. The war’s in order, and those who don’t believe it can simply be referred to the alphabet’s. Project Y, A bombs, B-29. It’s only a game of letters. It’s anything but a game of letters, it’s reality that is incomprehensible and chaotic and only borrows authority from an order Thot created out of sound.

A is aleph is an ox. Turn the A on its head and the horns rise out of the narrow triangular face and make long scratches in the day’s sky. Man ploughs with his ox, makes long straight lines of writing with his alphabet plough. All those who write are farmers in the mental field. A is the term for a known entity in logic. That is why one always feels a certain satisfaction with an A, here is something I know, here things start, that I know, that is logical. When something signifies itself, it is also A. The A is therefore suitable for the A-bomb, which means itself to an extent that is not humanly comprehensible. All languages have a pure A sound; it is the ox roaring in us, the ox that pulls us through the days, especially the D-days. Especially the days that are roared in Auschwitz; in Afghanistan, in Aljubarrota. The roar rises purely into the sky and embraces the horn of the new moon. We think we know it. We believe we can designate it. We believe in the alphabet; it is said that Allah gave the alphabet to Adam in secret, and whispered in his ear that the angels did not know it.

B is not A. B is that which comes after the beginning. When the movement has already been set in motion, when the first step has been taken and the second one follows automatically and thoughtlessly. The origin of B is a drawing of a house; originally with one room, but gradually extended to two. B is the two, B is double. This is where I live in my two-room house. The ox built, the I moved in. B is the bridge that leads from the beginning to the end.

C is G is a stylized camel. Is the sign the legs or the camel’s muzzle, where its tongue slobbers lustfully quivering? A hump perhaps. All the letters have been turned from their original position to be the image we cannot shake free of our consciousness. When the god Thot presented the letters to the pharaoh Thamus, Thot says, according to Plato, who reports the event as if he himself was present, that the letters and writing will improve the memory. It will fix the memory of occurrences in reality. Thamus protests, being of the opinion that writing will be a crutch for the memory, so it will forget to use itself. Writing is a help to forgetting. The users of writing will only have apparent wisdom; they will not have its reality.

So C is perhaps the camel’s stupidity. It sets off with its caravan and its goods and its thirst under the sun. Does writing make us stupider or cleverer? Is it only a cloud-cover between us and the world of realities, a G vessel where memories slosh around enclosed in writing?

To how great an extent does the letter capture the reality of what it covers? A-bomb, just to start somewhere. G-spot. They are black beetle’s legs that bring to life images of a reality, atom perhaps. A C major, as the sound from which Thot creates the letters. Organized chaos.

Perhaps the letters have nothing to do with what is sensed. The victims of the A-bomb with their skin in tatters. I can read it, but I cannot understand the pain that is involved. The taste of 10 small C vitamin pills in a small glass with a larger glass of orange juice next to it. The reality of taste like a curve in the palate. The pill glass with its C on the fridge. Writing is a beetle that can fly, and on its back sit images of reality clinging on while the tiny wings unfold.

But reality itself? It is so mighty, so chaotic that we cannot contain it. It must come flying like small drops that bump into the beetle and are caught and understood one drop at a time. Through the image of the letter. The taste of the C. The wonderful wave of the G in a spot.

D. It’s Delta, and it sounds like a river and the sign stems from the image of a fish. A fish that swims away in confusion from the Normandy beach. The Hebrew D means door, or perhaps heaven’s gate. The drowned should be asked this, at a time when Hebrew was synonymous with a door to a hell that could not be contained in a letter. D as in devil-traps, where letters are written on a round piece of paper with a hole in the middle, where devils and demons are then caught and trapped. Did Montgomery have such a one in his bag? Awareness of death in a delta of blood. A soldier looking at his hands that the blood is slowly leaving. The hands die before he does. There is not enough strength for a V-sign, victory has a letter, but death does not have its own.

E. Hermes is said to have modeled the letters after having followed the flight of the cranes in the sky while he was in exile and travelled in Egypt. What are the three strokes in the E? Originally heads and two raised arms of a person praying. To pray is to suspend gravity, but the E too has been turned, like a person stretching his arms to the sky who has been kicked to the ground – and now it is only arms stretched forward towards the rest of the word.

Other people think that the form of the E, if it is not the flight of birds, is an enclosure. That the ox of the A goes round in, perhaps.

F is V. A nail or a hook originally, to hang words on. Some people think the F is a symbol of the tree of life with its branches one can climb up and fall down from. Others that it is an Egyptian horned snake which the Phoenicians have taken over from a hieroglyph. The sound of the F is the snake. The sound of the syringe that is emptied into the bloodstream, the sound of consciousness on drugs. The venom of the horned snake in the blood. It is the first letter of the Runic alphabet, futharc, and it meant wealth; naturally wealth in cattle, so once again the ox is first, is the one that starts the writing and pulls the load, ploughs its lines in a perhaps fertile, perhaps dry and stony brain-soil. The strength and abundance of the ox frees us to be civilized. The power of the snake in the alphabet enables us to be uncivilized, simply be the hissing F of the blood in the focus of the needle. F is the fourth sound in the C major scale. The sound as abstract as the alphabet. One has to put a vowel in the mouth to be able to sing an F. F is written in thin Indian red ink next to a wrong result. That which falls off target and falls down from one of the branches on the tree of life.

H is without a doubt an enclosure. Just as the alphabet is an enclosure of thought. Freedom is a strange word; it is hard to imagine thought without the fence of the alphabet, and who knows whether it would be freer if it was based on something else – colors or sound expressions, for example. The first H was closed on all sides; there was no way out for thoughts or cattle. H is used to blow on the other letters; it sets something going that is not itself. It shows breathing in language – perhaps the enclosure is the rib cage that pushes air in and out between the sounds of the letters. Sometimes the H is silent. It closes off its breath to the world, and the spoken word suddenly contains something unsaid, a drawing of breath that could exist but that is hidden between other letters. It is also very apt as the symbol for hydrogen. Air swings into the alphabet and out again towards the world that the voice attempts to reach from its enclosure.

I is an enigma. Originally, I is a circle divided into two by a stroke, but the circle has disappeared and only the stroke is left – perhaps it divides the round sphere of the whole world into two each time the letter appears. I is the essence of the vertical, a striving top-down and bottom-up. With its shrill sound and clear shape it is a way of penetrating the world. The I is also a bone gnawed clean of its flesh. In English it contains the entire I in its upright being, its penetration of existence. Perhaps that is why it has been chosen in mathematics as a symbol for an imaginary number, namely the square root of –1. It is just as hard to define as the I, and its existence is an eternal question.

The next letter whose origin can be traced is K. A hand with fingers. A hand that says stop – or KZ camp. A letter that wrestles with the C and loses to it in many languages. With L we are back to the ox. Not the ox itself, but what lashes it. L is the whip frozen in the air. The ox is controlled by the whip when we sing lalala.

M is water. M is a wave. Unlike most letters, the M has not been turned and is still a swift movement of a wave drawn by a hand. Now the tops of the wave are written at the same height; in the original form they were more angular and each wave had the height the hand happened to land on. In the Middle Ages, people thought that God had written the word for man, OMO, on his actual face, with the M being a line from the brows with the nose as the mid-point and down again at the cheekbones. The two Os were the eyes. One could imagine an absent-minded and forgetful god that has to write the name of each being on its features. In the Runic alphabet, too, M stands for man.

M is also an abbreviation for Messier, who spent his life studying the stars until he fell into a well and later became blind. Man is the plaything of fate, despite the fact that he tries to place his letters above himself and plough the field of the sky. Stellar clusters are almost in our possession when their names are M5 and M13. They are subject to our knowledge, but our knowledge is subject to the alphabet, which means all and nothing at one and the same time.

F was perhaps a snake; N certainly is. N is the vast quantity numbers can be raised to; it creates a special aura of mystery in mathematics lessons. Just out where we cannot reach. Out there where the number is everything and subject to the alphabet; perhaps the first signs that later became letters were each a number.

N opens up to infinity. O shuts it in. O is an eye. In the original sign the pupil was indicated; now only the pupil is left. The Greek Omega is naturally a hoof-print of the cow Io was turned into by Hera. Io, who revealed her desire for Zeus, so already here O is linked to desire. The O that is the eye’s desire and the hole of sex. There are some, however, who think O is the sun. For a long time it came last in the Greek alphabet, hence the expression alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Those more mystically inclined think that O is the egg of the universe that the demiurge broke open so as to create the world. Perhaps it is desire that creates the world; the desire to turn oneself into a cow that, whipped, is the beginning of everything, that submits and in its submission creates. O is the roar of orgasm. O is the eye of the cunt that only opens its doors when called.

P is not the eye; P is the lower lip of the speaking mouth – that is how some people read the sign. Others see a boomerang that knocks over the primeval ox and returns to the civilizer; origin is always a gift – one sees what something could be but what it has already not been for a long time. P is a pill of freedom one takes in the morning, so that the O of orgasm can be let loose. No matter what one believes, the P sound is the easiest and most natural for babies to say. Papyrus, parchment and paper, lovers of the alphabet, that accept each lash of its black whip.

R: a human head, turned and twisted, a nose, an eye, a form that contains the self that speaks. The civilizer. The one who issues the order for a bomb, an A. For war, the one that presents the attributes of its chromosomes to others. The one that roars its O. It is called the dog-letter, because it is the sound that most resembles the snarling of a dog. The letter is that of the self where it begins its action. With the head.

S is not a snake, even though that is what the child often learns when the alphabet is rammed home into it and chains it forever to an abstract world of symbols. Where one cannot say A without thought offering B. But S is not a snake; it is a bow or arch. So it has the same origin as W. There are, as always, other opinions: mountain tops, teeth. But no snake. That though is what the Yezedi Arabs see, who therefore refuse to say the letter. The Romans put it on its own at the end of letters as an abbreviation for Salutem – a wish for good health.

T is a cross. Perhaps the cross inside a wheel; on a cart pulled by the ox. It can also mean Taurus, the bull. The alphabet roars and pulls us through the world. T is also Thor’s hammer. The world roars. Perhaps we ought to have invented a different alphabet, one that did not show the path of the ox, of the roar and ultimate authority placed in our consciousness. A softer alphabet, perhaps. Perhaps we could start all over again. Find new basic meanings for existence. Like U. A new invention. But this is perhaps a utopia. Rimbaud calls U green. Like the new creation of spring. V is also new. And thereby the V-sign. Perhaps peace is new, perhaps peace is the abnormal.

X is a support, a post where one waits, or a fish. It is the cosmic arch that says shhhhhh in human hands. X has to be tracked down. X is the place that has to be found. Where? You put an X and there it is. That’s where the attack is to be made, where one is to dig, that’s where there is something to be found. XXXXX Perhaps we don’t know what it is, but it’s there. The centre of the world for a moment. Just think of being able to say there and having a goal for one’s existence, for all the lines that constantly intersect in all possible and impossible directions.

Y is a symbol of a landmark. It is a philosophical letter, the symbol of a moral decision. There are two paths, one of which is to be followed. It is said to have been invented by Pythagoras. He introduces it by talking about Hercules, who like so many others is said to have taken the path of youth until he came to the crossroads where the broad part was the path of pleasure and the narrow path that of virtue. Y is an allegory of this choice that repeatedly has to be taken. That is why the right stroke is always thinner than the left.

Z is a sword. It is the last real letter, since the Danish æ, ø and å are only sounds that adapt the alphabet to the Danish language. The sword that defends civilization. It can also be the flash of lightning that separates the world of the alphabet from the world that has not yet been made into an alphabet. That, though, will not last long. In the order of the alphabet there is room for everything.