The letters of an alphabet are pictures as sounds. A good deal of mind knowing itself is concerned with pictures as sound, or sound as pictures. The relation of pictures to sound has to do with space and motion and time. Motion here joins space and time.

A body with a self makes sounds. The sounds can represent what the self is after. Words are directions for sound, and the alphabet is part of those directions.

The sounds that a body-with-a-self, or person, makes are like the sounds to be heard anywhere. The alphabet, then, is to be placed among the sounds of dishes falling, a waterfall, leaves rustling, wood crackling, wind sighing, cloth rubbing, paper tearing, iron hissing, birds singing, ocean roaring, clock ticking—and more and more. The alphabet, as used in words, goes after representing all these sounds; as I mentioned them, it is quite clear I used an alphabet to do so.

The relation of picture to sound in an alphabet didn’t occur mechanically or “by chance.” One of the matters of most import in existence is the relation of the still thing, a picture, to the moving thing, a sound.

The letters of the alphabet come from a togetherness of deep drive and insistent logic. Reason and instinct are both comfortably and unquestionably in every letter of the alphabet.

A vowel in the alphabet is of space and rest. A vowel is a syllable by itself, and can be a word by itself. Every vowel can be. A consonant has always a duality of things of weight meeting. Matter is accented, not space. Every consonant comes from a meeting of lip and lip, or lip and teeth, or tongue and the matter of the upper part of the mouth, or palate; or a combination of these; along with, it may be, some other phases of the throat or mouth, as matter.

Space is present in the vowel, in a way that it is not in the consonant. A duality or meeting of things of matter occurs in a person when saying consonants, in a way that does not occur in a person when saying vowels.