The Letter N

I detest throwing things away. Aside from useful things, like receipts and medical tests, often I keep things just because, well just because they are beautiful. They may not be original drawings, they may be details of paintings, they may be something that reminds me of the past like a card with illustrations of the twelve days of Christmas, or one with the brilliant colors of some strange bird. When I decide to put some order into my desk, there you go. Now why did I save that? I ask myself. Among the cards stashed away in my drawer, I find one with the letter N. There must be a reason, I tell myself, as I give in to curiosity. Why would I have kept it? Someone must have sent it to me although there is nothing written on the back. Not even what it is or where it came from. It is beautiful though.

It’s just a letter N. Caught, entwined by flowering vines; it takes a moment to find it, to realize that there’s a letter there, hidden by the tangle of vines. The light illuminating the letter, and the vines, comes from the left, but if you turn the card upside down, it comes from the right. Right side around, or upside down, it is always a letter N, set, with its vines, against a background of barely visible bands of blue and green and burgundy, covered with countless white dots that might be falling snow. The letter N itself is dark brown, light brown where it is struck, grazed, by the light. 

The vines and flowers one notes first are in varying shades of tan and grey – slate-colored. They twist and turn, they overlap, they imprison the letter N. You follow a branch as it swirls over and around the letter and itself. You attach yourself to the vine trying to make sense of its convolutions. It draws you into its depth. The flowers – one seems to resemble an artichoke bud, the other more mature with its tumescent center encapsulated by petals, seem to be facing in the opposite direction, the bud where it springs from the stalk, the flower hanging on before it becomes too heavy and about to fall.   

I cannot help but wonder where this N came from. As I see it, the light comes from the left, or should it not be the other way around? No, it definitely has to come from the left. It must have been followed by a word. But I shall never know. It somehow seems to be too three-dimensional for a medieval manuscript, yet that is probably when someone painstakingly painted it. Capturing, honoring, a letter N like this must mean that it was an important part of something. I wonder what that something was.  Search as I might on the internet, while I have found similar letters in Alamy, the letter N never turned up and none of the others was as three-dimensional.

There’s a geometric perfection to the trajectory of the vines. In nature plants do not grow at random but follow the mathematical patterns of the universe. The depth does make me think of Pollock, although his drips are freer, left to chance, the whims of the artist’s movement, not those of the Creator with a capital C, who leaves his mark in imbricated patterns. Out of the darkening past, into the glowing future.

Then for one reason or the other I think of Mondrian. Perhaps, the enigma of the juxtaposed planes?

The letter N. Shall it forever remain a mystery as we try to fathom the enigma of what the artist was trying to express and which held meaning only for him or for his contemporaries?  The letter N was part of a larger whole, part of a word that meant more than the letter by itself. It must have belonged to a medieval world with some intrinsic significance.

Some day, by chance, perhaps I will find out where that letter N came from. Life is full of mysteries. Life itself is a mystery, one which we are forever trying to solve, only to find that like the convoluted vines, there is always another one in hiding.