Beloved Netherwalkers,
To kick off a new section of Nether Street Blues, I’m introducing Flaneurisms: a collection of substantially insubstantial reflections gathered during strolls.
I write these while walking through Bucharest: aiming for elegance, settling for intriguing, but always alive. They’re not essays, not stories, not quite aphorisms either. Just fragments of thought carried on the rhythm of footsteps, stirred by cracked walls, pensioners’ murmurs, and the violent hum of my beloved capital.
Think of this section as a sidestreet off the main narrative: smaller, quieter, but no less haunted. Also, like all side streets, they will appear more often on our journey together. You can unsubscribe from Flaneurisms without leaving the rest of the fiction behind. Every Section has a toggle that you can access through this link https://stefanbaciu.substack.com/account.
"The Greek letter upsilon (Υ) was used as a symbol of choice in antiquity. The shape of the letter suggests a fork in the road. Eros always puts one at a fork." Anne Carson
For me, Y has always been the most eldritch letter in the alphabet.
Romanian is partly to blame. We don’t even pretend it's ours—our name for it is i grec, the “Greek I.” Foreignness baked into its very designation. On the alphabet poster above our first-grade blackboard, the only word associated with it was Yale—not the university, but the lock. A brand name that became the word itself. Like adidași, used by us for every kind of sneaker, whether Adidas or not. In childhood, words stick by iconography first, function second, and truth never.
But Y haunted me even beyond the linguistic oddity. It felt like a hinge between worlds: a letter that asks questions just by existing. A shape that branches—forks—the way decisions do, or rivers, or fates. It stands where things split. Where the soul strains to balance heaven and earth. Where sky and sea reflect each other, yet never touch.
Sometimes I see in it the very diagram of the Trinity: three points eternally held in tension. The singular stem splits into dual ascent. A silent metaphysics smuggled into a glyph.
V. Voiculescu, one of my favorite writers, had a similar obsession, only with the letter V. Many assumed it stood for Vasile (his given name), but no one called him that. Among his family, he was Dile; to others, he was always Doctor Voiculescu. The V was a totem, not an initial. For him, it was a vessel in which God Almighty might pour His Grace. Dile wanted to be that vessel.
Anne Carson, in Eros the Bittersweet, reflects on the Greek letter upsilon, ancestor of our modern Y, as a symbol of desire’s split nature. Its forked shape becomes a metaphor for longing: to want is to stand divided, suspended between paths. She draws on Ion by Euripides to illustrate this, a play of abandonment and revelation, where the self hangs in the balance of fate and recognition. In Carson’s reading, eros itself is shaped like a Y.
I use vampyre not just for the old-world flavour, though, as Rachel Victorianna commented, the spelling drips with that heavy crimson ink of another age. Nor is it only because, as Ricardo Guzman Jr pointed out on Josh Datko’s Bitpunk FM, “Vampires suck.” It’s because I needed my night creatures to carry a different essence than what pop culture has drained dry. The vampyre isn’t a trope, but a creature of mythic otherness, with rules that belong to no studio canon. The spelling marks a split. Like the Y, it’s a fork in the road between traditions. Like the V, it opens like a wound or a chalice. But it also coils with a tail, like a dragon, nay, a wyrm. It’s not just orthography, but also ontology.
Having said all this, I want to ask you, dear reader, what letter haunts you and why?
Note on the title
The Greek word γράμμα holds layered meanings. At its most basic, it refers to a letter of the alphabet, a single mark in the system of written signs. But it also means something written, not just the symbol, but the act or trace of inscription. More broadly still, γράμμα encompasses the very idea of writing itself, or any written character. In this way, it blurs the line between sign and meaning, form and content, the seen and the said.
Quite an interesting question! I am not sure, maybe it is Z in English because it is the final. The end. Why can there be no more letters?!
That was such an interesting read. I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so beautifully articulate their fascination with a single letter. I’ve always had a soft spot for the letter F myself.
I used to write secret letters in Greek alphabet back in high school, made my own Greek style cipher. Reading this piece reminded me of that.