I don’t think I was entirely in Chicago today. Oh, I went to work, as I normally do; I endured my normal shift—as I normally do—but I was seized by a kind of detachment as well. It was a subtle form of detachment: nothing I felt consciously until my departure from work and my trek to a slightly-more-distant el station. By the time I actually felt the detachment of the day, I figured it was simply because I was in the mood to observe and to—quite possibly—feed the kernel of a story idea that has been germinating since I wrote a fragment of an imaginary city in yesterday’s post/dedication. The sense of detachment—if that’s even the right word—was very real, and very much associated with the unreal cities of Ií-Upon and Ií-Beneath. As such detachment comes upon me, it’s usually because of a story idea, forcing itself into my conscious thoughts, or the simple desire to be the anthropologist and record some transient phenomenon in Chicago. Today, that particular feeling took a slightly different, and marvelously surprising route. I suspect that it has everything to do with the imagined cities embedded in yesterday’s post, but not in the usual way. As I crossed the Wells Street bridge I noticed gulls wheeling on frigid currents and eddies of air. They squawked and trilled to one another in the characteristic language of gulls. They wrote strange patterns in the air by simply hurling themselves along tight, spiraling trajectories, and as I watched them, I wondered if they were—like yesterday’s crows—a map of a particular region. What surprised me was when one gull in particular landed atop a decorative obelisk at the south end of the Wells Street Bridge. The creature in question simply landed and seemed to look directly at me for a moment. Seeing the opportunity for a shot, I pulled out my camera, at which point the gull proceeded to re-adjust its furled wings and simply look somewhere else. I noticed something; as I’d already been thinking about writing systems, I saw what I’d taken—at first—to be the kernel of a hieroglyphic symbol. And, for a moment, it was; but as I thought more about it, I realized that it was something a little more sophisticated. Hieroglyphic symbols, for all of their mysterious beauty, are blunt and inaccurate; they represent ideas, as any symbol might, but if a language dies (such as the language of the Ancient Egyptians) anyone attempting to reconstruct that language may be faced with the daunting absence of vowels. This is the case with ancient Egyptian. We know the words, but we don’t actually know how to say them, since the hieroglyphics in question are not a record of vowel sounds. The gull on the obelisk was not the kernel of a hieroglyphic; it was, instead, something more alphabetic in nature, something known among those language-studying-sorts-of-people as an Abugida: each symbol (character, or “letter”) contains a complex set of instructions embedded in the indicated consonant sound with either an inherent or dependent vowel (usually indicated by a doohickey on top: a slash, a line, or some other kind of thingy-whatsit.) I don’t know what sort of consonant + inherent vowel the gull on an obelisk was showing me, but I suspect it’s intimately linked with the language spoken in the imaginary city of Ií-Upon. I also suspect that it would be a consonant + different inherent vowel, if the gull was facing the other way, and it would probably be a consonant + dependent vowel, if the gull was not there at all. This image is a cultural note. Perhaps some fictional character from the fictional city of Ií-Upon will see this image and proceed to tell me something about her (or his) native language, and oddly-graceful writing system. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.