Useless characters

Recently my mom sent me a story from The New Yorker about a guy who made miniature palaces. He was a big hit with the king who hired him. This artist could carve not only an apple the size of a grain of sand but the fly on the apple. He got better and better, carving the fly’s hairs and the molecules of the hairs. His work got steadily more and more precise until neither he nor anyone else could actually see what he was carving. They didn’t fire him, just shut him up in a room alone and had food brought to him while he carved his amazing but pointless carvings. He was perfectly happy, obsessively happy.

Sometimes I think I could be like that. I consider myself a writer by nature and I have a job that involves writing and layout and graphic design. I enjoyed drawing as a kid, and I used to create newspapers for fun, so it’s all right up my alley. But sometimes I feel like my tastes take a turn that is obsessive, minute, approaching uselessness.

Most people who consider themselves “visual” or “creative” can come up with great schemes or ideas. There are days when I have good ideas and grand schemes. I think I am reasonably productive. But the grand scheme is not my greatest joy in life. I am happier staring at a black-and-white page of type (the right type, set in an attractive manner) than at a colorful poster. I am happier staring at a single perfectly curving letter than at the flashiest full-color effect that a Photoshop artist can produce.

People who consider themselves writers often have plots and ideas. Sometimes I have plots and ideas, but I’m best at just amassing words. People will complain about too much information on a page and I will nod my head, completely uncomprehending. I love spreadsheets and pages of words. Or I look at closed books and revel in all the wisdom and adventure and beauty that I know, without even opening them, is inside.

When you read about the carver of miniature palaces, it does occur to you to wonder if the things he is carving really exist, since even he must be unable to see them. But that is not the conclusion that I reached at the end of the story. I believe that he really could carve things that minuscule. I believe that his gift continued to approach the ever-more-slightly tinier limit of perfection until he died.

I am interested in Chinese calligraphy right now. Chinese writing is remarkable because it conveys meaning that speech alone cannot convey. To us, written language is an imperfect system for representing speech. Chinese script, however, is more perfect than speech.

In China, calligraphy has historically been an art form as eminent as (or even moreso than) poetry or painting. The characters are important for their appearance, not just their meaning. A specimen of calligraphy is described this way: “reeds on the shoreline of a quiet lake―the slender strokes bent by the night breeze rustle in the still twilight,” or compared to dancers, farmers, forests, waterfalls, in Johan Bjorksten’s book pictured above.

I could get lost in this arguably useless world forever. Fortunately I have a marvelously broad range of tasks at work, including talking to people, and ample extracurricular activities that keep me away from home, so there is no immediate danger of ending up in a lonely room with food passed to me under the door. I know I would probably hate it if I actually did have that much solitary time on my hands. But I admit I dream of it sometimes.