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I’ve always been drawn to code: html, morse, NATO phonetic, maritime signal, braille and musical annotation. The codification of sign into language, how sign looks and dances across the page.  In the case of morse and musical annotation making the inferred sounds lift up and off the page: annotations into sound, sound into letters, letters into words, words as language, musical or otherwise.   Well, something like that. 

I recently visited the State Library of South Australia which includes a Morse Code Telegraph set in its collection.  I picked up a sheet which set out the morse code alphabet and numbers from 1 to 10.  ‘I’ looked like two eyes, ‘X’ with eyes jammed between two dashes and the numbers 6 to 10 stacked on top of each like a waterfall of dots.  Already they suggested images detached from the language they intended to spell out.

Issue 12 of Panda plays with musical annotation and morse code by using graph paper as the base, applying dots and dashes (or dits and dahs) of morse climbing up and down the lines, making nonsense of the sounds and combining the two to create a visual meaning of its own. 

The most famous Morse Code combination, the one signalling distress, SOS, is a call for ‘help’ on the most basic of levels.  There is an urgency to the plea which is mirrored in the phonetic spacing, or non-spacing, of the letters.  Here is an unbroken sequence in the code with no spaces between the letters, transmitted as an unbroken sequence of three dots / three dashes / three dots. Usual spacing between letters in morse code is separated by a space of duration to three dits or dots. 

At the time I was playing around with the code on graph paper, using Gansai Tambi’s No. 20 (black) watercolour to ink the dots, dashes and pandas, I was reading Haruki Murakami’s, The City and its Uncertain Walls. A paragraph jumped out from the page:

“I might not have much time left which is why I’m pounding desperately at the telegraph keys, tapping out my SOS …. I might not get the final message out.  The sea might break down the door at any minute and rush in …. malicious, salty, the deadly sea.”

Help! I’m drowning (sometimes).