James Hampton (1909–1964) was an American outsider artist. He worked as a janitor, and in his spare time, in secrecy, he built a large assemblage of religious art, made from scavenged materials: cardboard, plastic, glue, pins, tape, old furniture, jelly jars, aluminum and gold foil, shards of mirror, desk blotters held together with tacks, and discards like light bulbs from the federal office buildings where he worked. He called this art piece the Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly (which is often abbreviated to simply the Throne). It is on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington. When I first saw it, it immediately made me think of Incan or Aztec artefacts – while Christian influenced, I find the Throne does have a certain Mesoamerican look to it.
Hampton created this complex work of art over a period of 14 years in a rented garage; it’s based on several religious visions he had that told him to prepare for Christ’s return. The museum website states, “The Throne embodies a complex fusion of Christianity and African-American spiritual practices overlaying themes of deliverance and freedom.” The written text ‘FEAR NOT’ appears at the top of the centrepiece. Many objects are inscribed with quotes from the Book of Revelation. Art critic Robert Hughes wrote that the Throne “may well be the finest work of visionary religious art produced by an American.”
The Smithsonian website also tells us, “Hampton also left texts written in an arcane spiritual script that he may have understood as the word of God as received by him.” It is these texts I want to focus on, as I’m drawn to undeciphered texts, asemic writing, alien-esque symbols, and the strange writing that is produced during, or inspired by, non-ordinary states of consciousness or episodes of mental distress. (Some of the handwritten tags that hang from components of the Throne also feature Hampton’s arcane script.)
Hampton was a person whose life was full of direct and potent experiences of a religious nature: he wrote about how God visited him often, that Moses appeared to him in 1931, the Virgin Mary in 1946, and Adam on the day of Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in 1949. He kept a 108-page notebook titled St James: The Book of the 7 Dispensation, and it contains his indecipherable language, which is now known as ‘Hamptonese’. The title indicates the religious connotations of the text, as does some of the English that appears alongside it. He ends each page with the word ‘REVELATION’. In the notebook, Hampton refers to himself as St. James with the title ‘Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity. He was a reclusive person; he had a few close friends, but he spent most of his time working on his shrine.
The Book of the 7 Dispensation contains page after page of cryptic symbols, strokes and slashes, numbered by chapter like the Bible. Mark Stamp at San Jose State University in California has scanned and uploaded the pages of Hamptonese text. At first glance, I thought it might have semantic meaning, as there are distinct characters, and some patterns emerge (e.g. pairs of characters seem common).
In 2005, Stamp and Ethan Le published their research on this mysterious (and undeciphered) script, which bears little resemblance to any known written language. They first transcribed the Hamptonese into a computer-friendly form and then analysed it using hidden Markov models to reveal any underlying statistical properties of the text. These models, or algorithms, can detect patterns in spoken and written speech. This means that the letters and phonetics of English could be compared to those of Hamptonese. However, Stamp and Le’s analysis showed that “Hamptonese is not a simple substitution for English and provides some evidence that Hamptonese may be the written equivalent of “speaking in tongues”.” In other words, Hamptonese is an example of asemic writing: it is without semantic content.
This ‘speaking in tongues’ analogy caught my attention, as I have used the term pseudographia to refer to asemic writing – or meaningless, word-like writing – that is produced in an unconscious way, similar to the Surrealist practice of automatic writing. In one article, I likened pseudographia to speaking in tongues (also known as glossolalia); I view it as the written version of letting your mind and hand ‘go loose’ and write without any real language in mind. (You can find some more of my writing on pseudographia here, as well as in Chapter 5 of my book Altered Perspectives. I have also found myself engaging in pseudographia when creating some asemic writing, as shown here.)
I have also compared pseudographia to a healthy version of hypergraphia. The latter refers to an intense urge or compulsion to write, sometimes to the point of being excessive or even obsessive. It can manifest in copious amounts of writing, often with a focus on religious or moral issues. Hypergraphia is often associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, but it can also be a symptom of conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and frontotemporal dementia. Pseudographia may also be marked by an unconscious drive to write – although, in this case, the drive is to produce meaningless text – but unlike hypergraphia, it is not associated with a brain or psychological condition.
Was Hampton’s writing output a sign of pseudographia or hypergraphia? Curator and art historian Leslie Umberger writes that the Throne “was interpreted foremost as a work of Christian visionary art, but presumptions regarding the sanity of a man who had spent his free time alone, consumed with bringing his grand vision to fruition, cast Hampton as eccentric, if not mentally unsound.” Do the reams of gibberish writing also lend evidence to the idea that Hampton was mentally unsound? Eccentric, certainly. But it is difficult to retroactively conclude that Hampton was ‘not of sound mind’, let alone diagnose him with a particular mental health condition. Casey N. Cep opines in a piece for Pacific Standard:
The assumption that Hampton was insane, based either on the radical simplicity of his materials or the continued secrecy of his language, might be the most comfortable way of explaining his life and work, but it is also the most callow. Perhaps we can live with the possibility that a man worked for years to astonish the rest of us, not because he was crazed, but because he was truly inspired.
The very fact that he produced Hamptonese, and so much of it, cannot itself be taken as evidence of some mental health problem. Hampton still held down a job; he was able to take care of himself; and he had friends (despite being reclusive). The life and work of Hampton is interesting as it exemplifies how far eccentricity can go, and it invites us to think about how there is not always a neat dividing line between eccentricity and madness, or between religious fervour and religious delusion. Was Hampton fortunate to have personally meaningful religious experiences? Or should we deem his religious obsessions as veering into the realm of the grandiose and the delusory?
The mysterious, undeciphered nature of Hamptonese, and Stamp and Le’s use of the glossolalia analogy, also made me think of Luigi Serafini’s undeciphered text – known as Serafinian – which appears in his Codex Seraphianianus. Serafini has confirmed that the text is meaningless, but, interestingly, he described the process of producing the writing as automatic, as something that flowed out of him in a mysterious way. It appears that to produce 300 pages of language-like writing, it would only be feasible through this unconscious process. So perhaps Hampton was in a similar state of mind. His writing may have poured out of him, just as speech-like sounds pour out of the mouths of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians when they’re overcome by a state of religious passion.
Stamp and Le’s 2005 paper, however, is not conclusive. They provide evidence that Hamptonese is the written equivalent of speaking in tongues, but they admit there may be some limitations and flaws in their analysis, and that in the future, the language-like nature of Hamptonese may reveal itself to be decipherable in some way. Nonetheless, currently, it seems that Hamptonese is most likely asemic.
