Forests of symbols

I’ve been reading Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing ever since Christmas and finally finished it. It’s sort of hard to follow (I think he could have used a more systematic editor), but it has prompted much reflection on the nature of writing.

Writing fascinates me. Learning new alphabets is fun; handwriting is important enough to experiment with and remodel from time to time. Letters are exciting. Living in another era, I would have been temperamentally inclined to credit the myths that described writing as a sacred gift from the gods.

In truth writing probably began with accountants, who made knots in ropes, scratched notches on sticks, or inscribed clay tokens to symbolize unwieldy animals. It was when the marks they made assumed a phonological significance apart from the objects they represented that this became complete writing. Fischer emphasizes that this was a groundbreaking technological innovation, not an evolutionary process. He suggests that complete writing was invented only once in all history: a rare idea indeed. All the diverse instances of it around the world, from the most awkward to the most ingenious, are variations on the unique idea of complete writing that popped up in Sumer around 3700 BC:

1. Its purpose is communication.
2. It consists of artificial graphic marks on a durable surface (or electronic medium).
3. It uses marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech.

It is not that unromantic that we owe accountants for the concoction of letter magic. After all, what is a story but an account? In French, a compte rendu is a summary of something you’ve heard. And a conte is a pure fairy tale.

To populate our tales (a word that used to mean counts, just like tallies,) we need all the races of letters―gothics and grotesques, romans and moderns and humanists, capitals and uncials and minuscules. We delight in their anatomy of bowls and crossbars, ears and crotches, legs, arms, apices, vertices, tails, terminals, hairlines, stems, spurs, and spines. Not to mention heng, shu, and the other limbs I haven’t learned yet, to make beautiful creatures I mentioned earlier.

With picayune pecunia we assemble the words that form our armies of arguments. We can take nothing for granted in our accounting. The tale of writing is rich.

Simple patio or vast estate?

Tonight I installed a cuter (and hopefully more reliable) modulator-demodulator. I am filled with good humor at being able to post, and at a happy ending to my long, heroic battle with the Enemies.

I have discovered that you get better results with “I need this replaced. It doesn’t work and it’s under warranty” than with a reasonable articulation of the problem. At the Apple Store it got me an appointment with the less than enthusiastic Geniuses (have you heard of them??) after they were officially closed, and at the cable place it got me the cute new modem, no questions asked. I was delighted at the force with which the taciturn employee hurtled the old one into a bin in a cabinet plastered with “LUV YA” and “SWEET BOY” hearts. I was expecting they would test it, it would work, and I would drive the 45 minutes back home crying.

I have always prided myself on being reasonable, but now I am beginning to appreciate that unreasonable and closed-minded women may be more highly evolved for today's society.

So anyway, since I am in a good humor, I think I will postpone my planned post on life as a long defeat (which gets ever more confusing the more I think about it) and just share some silly things that have amused me lately.

I.
I was driving to work this week and heard two delightful radio ads, one after the other. One was for an outdoor lighting installation service that will meet your needs “whether you have a simple patio or a vast estate.” That made me laugh. Alas for them, I have a simple patio that is already amply lit.

II.
The other ad was for some kind of car-leasing arrangement, I think. I wasn’t really listening. At one point the man said, “How would you feel about buying a pre-owned car whose previous owner wasn’t a person?” He goes on to explain that the previous owner was the car dealer, but not before my mind had pictured King Kong or some large muddy reptile at the wheel of my fine automobile.

III.
So, speaking of strange creatures, I just have to share these wonderful peoplemals. My favorite is the octopus.

One of my childhood friends drew a silly picture of a person once. For a long time I kept it because I couldn’t help laughing every time I saw it. I have no idea what is was about that picture. I still have it somewhere, backed with cardboard and stuck to a popsicle stick. I hope these peoplemals have a similar effect on you when you see them. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to link to them for a long time, but do you ever need an excuse for this?

IV.
I love it when you buy a head of lettuce and the metal twist tie around it says, “Eat 5 a day for better health.”

Those are all the funny things I can remember right now (that are appropriate to share with my vast and diverse readership). I should have kept a list.

Here Be Dragons

For someone who had always pictured Kings Richard and John of England as cartoon lions, Sharon Kay Penman’s book was an enlightening read. I thought John was especially well portrayed. I want to read more about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

For me the great value of this book was in the details about life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For instance, they spread rushes on the floor as a sort of carpeting, and changed them when they needed to be changed. I might try that one of these days. It might beat vacuuming.

The most shocking thing for me was that they only had one meal a day in Wales, in the evening. I would have died. I was comforted that it was a significant adjustment for the main character, too.

Pictured above is one of several small scenes I encountered upon coming home yesterday. My guest―a delightful friend who sows beauty and poetry wherever she goes―had posed my penguin with his wing in the almond jar. She’s also the kind of guest who replaces certain disapproved-of items in your pantry with higher-quality or less-toxic varieties. It cracks me up. I appreciate her audacity... and generosity.

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok. But I don’t want to spoil the scene for people who haven’t read it. What do I do? I guess I will have to keep quiet. Some kind of blog.

Conclusions

I have come to some conclusions about life lately. I have decided that Out of Africa is now my favorite book and that of Brahms’s symphonies, my favorite is the fourth.

Also, I’m kind of off the bunny kick. A majority of my family is anti-bunny. Several acquaintances have been unenthusiastic. I don’t really have time to give a bunny the attention it needs. And before Christmas, a wise-looking elderly man in Tucson’s best used bookstore, glimpsing the About Your Rabbit book I was carrying under my arm, warned me that they are twice as much work as you expect them to be. What could be more convincing than an aging stranger’s unsolicited advice?

Since my blog must remain inconclusive, I will wrap up with today’s wildlife sighting:

In the distance behind me I hear the consternation of a woman whose dog has gotten loose. I keep walking ahead, hoping not to encourage the animal, but as I hear it approaching I grow curiouser and curiouser. A great whirring and flapping indicates a beast of significant size.

Sure enough, a huge brown hound (please pause to say that out loud) is soon trotting beside me, its spine almost as high as my hipbones, its head down sniffing, taking no notice of me. I am content to have such a calm and independent creature at my side, filling up the empty half of the sidewalk, but after a few steps I begin to worry about its owner, who is becoming breathless in her pursuit.

I turn around and wait for a few moments while she approaches. I express my amazement at her pet’s dimensions. “And he’s just a puppy,” she says. “Eleven months.”

“Do you mean he’ll get bigger?” Truly, this is a marvelous beginning to the day. The words “huge brown hound” bring considerable merriment to the rest of the walk. I know, it doesn’t take much.

An ear for German

I was reading some Rilke to a friend two nights ago and was happy to hear her say it was beautiful. I have always wanted to prove to someone that German is a pretty language, or at least could be thought of as pretty. Most people think it isn’t. But would they think so if everyone else hadn’t told them that from their inception? Is it really an objective truth?

Take a word like Friedrich. If you say it right, it’s the gentlest rippling of air through your mouth, a relaxing of control to let a soft breeze pass along your throat, tongue, and teeth. You have to smile to say it.

Now German is the poorer for lacking our exquisite th sounds, but it has other sounds that fall in the same class of feather-soft, downy, maternal whisperings.

As for Rs, I think German’s uvular R is superior to the French velar one. It is liquid rather than raspy. I enjoy hearing my German-speaking friend pronounce her French Rs à l’allemand.

I think what people hear and dislike about German is a lot of stops and fricatives. But German is about control of the vocal passages. Americans don’t have to open their throats, and we become unpleasantly nasal. However, German is a rhythmic river of sound, a carefully restrained singing.

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.

Double delight

One of my favorite things is setting up surprises and waiting for them to hatch. It can be tricky when you’re targeting a large concentration of people with a single source of surprise, because you want as many unique instances of surprise as possible. This was satisfactorily achieved over my Christmas vacation, with no particular care on my part.

I got my brother and sister-in-law a blue faucet light. It wasn’t really a Christmas present, but I wanted to get them something extra for their house since I was staying there for a long time. I came across the light in my favorite gift shop. I had no idea they existed, but it was prophetically clear that this had to be purchased for them. Gift-giving is one of my greatest sources of anxiety, so it is wonderful when the perfect gift appears. Everything is right. Nothing is better than that.

You may be wondering about the blue faucet light. It is not a cheesy gift. It is a reputable, high-quality piece of hardware that installs onto the end of your faucet after you remove the existing mesh thing. It comes with batteries installed PLUS a second set of batteries. It also comes with two adaptors, making it likely to fit any faucet in America. My siblings were pleased with the improvement it caused in their faucet’s water flow. The light it emitted was remarkable. It would even flash after you turned the faucet off, as water continued to drip.

So we installed it. I have to mention here that the reaction from my siblings was disappointing. They seemed to think it more weird, less amazing. But I persevered in my enthusiasm, and I think they eventually saw it for what it was. They began looking forward to episodes of discovery by the guests at their New Year’s party.

Meanwhile, I was anticipating the joyful reactions of my parents, who arrived later than I did. They flew in and went straight to their hotel the first night. The next time they were there, I casually asked if anyone needed to wash their hands and no one wanted to. (Pigs.) It might have been a days later when the older generation finally came over to the Little Presidio after dinner. While everyone was hanging around in the living room accomplishing nothing, I finally couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Hey, Mom,” I said, “I think you need to wash your hands. They smell kind of funny.” My sister-in-law, sitting across from my dad, lowered her face into her hands and tried not to laugh audibly.

“Oh, OK,” Mom said, and headed into the bathroom. I guess decades of raising tactless children keeps one from taking offense too easily.

She used the toilet and then washed her hands. I imagined her happiness at seeing the unexpected electric-blue water.

She came out of the bathroom. “Why is the water blue?” The room erupted in riotous laughter. “That’s really cool!” she added. I knew my mom had taste!

“Bear, you need to go use the sink,” she said. “I think you’ll like it.” My dad was sitting in the epicenter of the hilarity, reading The Arms of Krupp.

“Oh, really?” he said, slowly entering the 21st century. He hesitated, got up, walked slowly down the hall as if he feared some trap, and went over to the sink. Then he gave his daughter the gift she wanted: a spontaneous “That is so neat!”