Canto XXXI/1 In a series of drawings called Letters from a Cranes kin Bag I explored what might be called primordial letter-forms (it was in a craneskin bag that Hermes carried the elements of written language, for cranes seem in their skeins of flight to spell out letters in the sky). Here the same forms do double duty in describing the language of Nimrod, architect of the Tower of Babel (whose tongue speaks gibberish now) and the unified language of the world that his vainglorious scheme brought to an end. The same basic lithograph represented, in Canto V11/2, the incoherent speech of Plutus, though there it was partially concealed by overlay. The colours relate to rock paintings I studied in the Kalahari from which these forms derived: they also have a hint of earth-based building materials for it was Nimrod's folly to try and make the earth stretch to Heaven. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.