| I started making the drawings…as a way to both counter and enhance this power, depending on my mood, as a way to gain false mastery of the words, of the language, and as a way to enter an alternative world in order to jump start my neurotransmitters during a nasty depression one winter, I started translating sections of the letters into Morse Code. I use the resulting dot and dash sequences to build the drawings—imagined pseudo-cryptic constructions that have their origin in the urgent, flawed and sometimes hackneyed language of two young people who thought they were in love. | 
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Chris Spinelli
Courtesy of the artist.Language sucks.
I often don’t get words right. I end up sounding stupid. Then I wish I could be silent, always silent.
No speaking…no writing…nothing.
But, that’s impossible. Words are necessary because words…words, are, well, necessary. For years, in an old Samonsonite portfolio, I’ve kept these letters—love letters. Pressed together in a jumbled mass, some still secure in their original envelopes, they’ve sat untouched for long periods of time on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. I can’t bring myself to throw them out, and to be honest I don’t think I ever will.
When I’m confident and secure, when the fictions I tell myself to get by in the world seem plausible, the letters are practically meaningless: mildly interesting relics from another age, a series of worn marks on paper. Other times, the vulnerable times, when life appears to be a bad, boring, fiction, the letters expand in importance, and the nostalgia becomes unbearable.
That’s why I started making the drawings. As a way to both counter and enhance this power, depending on my mood, as a way to gain false mastery of the words, of the language, and as a way to enter an alternative world in order to jump start my neurotransmitters during a nasty depression one winter, I started translating sections of the letters into Morse Code. I use the resulting dot and dash sequences to build the drawings—imagined pseudo-cryptic constructions that have their origin in the urgent, flawed and sometimes hackneyed language of two young people who thought they were in love.
