« The spot has become a stroke – Armed with their awls, brushes, stylets, burins, duck reed, goose, eagle or swan feathers, and steel later on, carving the letters in the stone, drawing in the wax or clay, or pottery pieces and also drawing shoulder blades, papyrus, parchments on bark, leather, fabrics, bamboo sticks, banana leaves or rice papers ; grinding ink and diluting it into horns, cups, into lead, bronze, golden or silver inkers, earthenwares or porcelains inkers too, fusing water with black carbon, or iron tannin, or oak gall mixed with a varnished oil, gum or pigments, sweeping through from Summer to Egypt, and from India to China, grabbing every empty space, as the queer poet will do wrapping the whole world with the word “ Liberty”, all along the centuries we can notice battalions of scribes, court clerks, copyists, hieroglyphers, scholiasts, glossators, archivists and very soon writers, in a cheerful and contagious poetic frenzy, filling in signs and glyphs, gravestones, business contracts, inventory treasures, judgements, treaties, sealed decrees, incantations, exchange of gifts, claims and testimonies, poem anthologies. They also waste their energies in boundless scripture fancies, then multiply an incredible diversity of shapes without any relations between them, but though all of them, are bound to the same ancestor as guardian for their secret brotherhood : the spot has become a stroke.”
>[Jean Biès]
