Headnote from Christopher Patton

I was in a room with Gertrude Stein and some undergrads. We were meeting indeterminacy together for the first time. I drew a messy sketch on the blackboard, little overlapping circles inside a bigger lumpy vaguely circle thing.

—Anyone know what this is?

I thought I was being funny. My illegible handwriting and inscrutable diagrams were by now a running joke.

—A blastocyst?

How’d she do that? Early in its development, an embryo spends time as a blastocyst, when the twenty or so cells amassed inside it are pluripotent, able to become any tissue at all, brain, bone, blood. They’re unrealized, every kind of cell in potential, and none actually. This is like that. In an indeterminate text, an indefinite number of possible meanings circulate, holding each other back from completion. It’s different from metaphor or ambiguity. You can’t get by simply holding two or three meanings in mind at once. Instead you have to let the possibility of meaning hold you.

Asemic writing is indeterminacy among the graphemes. In the system we’re using here, the number one (1) is a grapheme you might confuse with a sans-serif capital i (I) or a lower-case ell (l). And zero (0) and oh (O) are s0 easily mistook. Usually as readers we resolve these uncertainties before we’re aware of them. Asemic writing invites us to revel in them instead—to let our body’s eye, our mind’s eye, our third eye, wander to the edge of wonder and over.

Some define asemic writing as “writing with no semantic content.” It’s empty of meaning yet full of meaningfulness. Think of scat singing, which has no content you can parse, but it can move your body, touch your heart, expand your feeling for what speech and song are, and open your head to history.

Asemic writing is illegible in the way scat is unintelligible. The grapheme or phoneme stops being a tool and becomes a field of play.

Asemic art takes writing systems (hieroglyphs, logograms, alphabets) and writing supports (pen and brush, paper and wall) as its raw materials. Of language, but not in language, it can offer momentary renovations of linguistic perception. It opens our senses to other facets of the medium we live in, as if we were fishes living in water, aware of living in water.