you’re left only with figure. Instead of having a gestalt, a figure and ground, writing leaves you only with figure. It is an extremely abstract process. You see, the letters in the phonetic alphabet have no meaning. /A/, /b/, /c/, /d/—it’s not a, b, c, d—it’s /a/, /b/, /c/, /d/. These meaningless phonemic sounds enable you to translate any language, doesn’t matter what language, into those sounds; meaningless sounds. If the letters have any meaning at all, you can’t translate. But you have to have this neutral, abstract, meaningless set of figures as a way of translating sounds into sight, and when you do this, you pull the ground out from the gestalt and are left only with the figures. And the result of having figure without a ground is Euclid, is logic. What is called “logic” is pulling out the ground from under the figures and tying the figures together in tight patterns. Again, with the alphabet with
