Threefold 18
cuneiform writing, BIND25, and the stars at Red Rocks.
Welcome to the Threefold Letter. This month a repose in the origins of books and deep time, a conference paper on the book’s form and content speaking together, and into the deep time of star-gazing.
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September was a big month, and I collapsed into October looking for ways to relax, distract, redirect, and regroup. And to do that, I began with cuneiform tablets.
In August, after the fabulous symposium ‘Introducing Object Book Space’ (held at ObjectSpace, Ponsonby in June) I was reading the oft recommended book by Amaranth Borsuk: The Book. A wide spanning overview of the book, its history and its ongoing life, The Book ‘began at the beginning,’ with cuneiform writing which was developed around 2800 BCE in Southern Mesopotamia.
My first note from my reading of Borsuk is “Enheduana, first named author.” Enheduana was a Sumerian High Priestess and lived from roughly 2334 – 2279 BCE in what is now modern-day Iraq. That the first recognised author was a woman, the first identified voice out of deep time, it felt like a karanga. So, I then read Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author, by Sophus Helle. And then Cuneiform: Ancient Scripts by Irving Finkel.
A jaunt into clay, unfamiliar writing systems, and the deep past guided by a call from Enheduana herself, felt like the perfect escape from my billowing fabric books and their poems in English. By the time I arrived home from Nelson, I had a plan firmly in place – I would make some tablets of my own.
No doubt I should have done more research, acquired more appropriate tools (a reed stylus? An implement shaped like a reed stylus?) and formed a more coherent plan of what I wanted to make, but all I really wanted to do was press ‘words’ into clay. What is this material to writing? How is the writing made? How did writing and books start here?
Given my utmost reverence of books and their role in my life, their role in my creative practice, in my making sense of the world and myself, it makes perfect sense to me that books were brought to life formed from clay like Hineahuone. Writing is a manifestation of ourselves, our voices, our stories, our belonging, our connections and kinships. And it started in clay, just like us (in a cosmogonic sense).
Having read Finkel’s book, I understood that the writing system was based on impressions. A stylus cannot be dragged through the clay; it must be pressed. I was unprepared for the slowness of this action, and for how difficult it was to make the appropriate shapes, to adjust the angle of the implement I was using to make variable marks towards something resembling the cuneiform visuality.
In the end I returned to writing systems and hand movements a little more familiar to me: runes and ogham. An awl from my bookbinding kit, sharp and thin, made clean straight lines easily, slicing through rather than dragging (and displacing) the clay.
All of this play returned me once again to Tim Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. In particular, the chapter ‘The Materials of Life.’ Ingold states that the maker is “a participant in amongst a world of active materials.” This is a maxim for my creative practice because making is a collaboration, a partnership, between me and the materials. But a partnership requires the groundwork of knowing each other, knowing together. “Practitioners know [materials] by knowing their stories of what they do and what happens to them when treated in particular ways”
Working with materials with which I am familiar, printmaking ink, fabric, paper, letterpress type, I can forget how well I know the character of the materials. By working with clay, a material I do not know well, I was forced to reckon with its affordances: a reminder to be mindful of the ways in which materials, even those I think I know, can continue to teach and guide me in our collaborative making practice.
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Alongside Amaranth Borsuk, the other ‘book theorist’ recommended at the Object Book Space symposium, was Ulises Carrion, and it is his manifesto ‘The New Art of Making Books’ on which my BIND25 conference paper was based, and I thought I might share the text and videos of that paper. (Note, the second half of my paper was using a document camera looking at the books and taking questions, so that part isn’t here). If you are interested in watching the recordings of all the other brilliant presentations, you can still purchase access to the full conference here.
Printing and Binding Fabric Books
I was recently introduced to writing by the late Ulises Carrion, a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and theorist who wrote a manifesto titled ‘The New Art of Making Books’ in 1975, and I’ve been very taken by his way of thinking. So, I begin here, he says a book is not a bag of words.
He says, ‘A book is a sequence of spaces.’
In this long thin book, titled ‘retting dialect,’ with its hinge on the short edge, turning the pages takes time and so creates spaces to be in. The user of this book must be active in moving between the spaces, and the spaces between each page turn cannot be rushed. The fabric page cannot be flicked open. The page turn is not automatic. The page turn is deliberated. The book dictates its own spaces and the time spent in them. The book’s content and its form speak together. The process of retting the tī kōuka leaves for this book took about three weeks.
He says, ‘A book is a sequence of moments.’
Ulises Carrion’s manifesto seems to remain focused on pages as purely sequential, one page after the other. But even when we move through a book in different directions, we are still making a sequential experience. Books are necessarily a sequence. But a book’s user can make any route through a book, building any sequence of moments. The sequence can be blurred and remade.
In a ‘whole story in the eye of the sea’, there is a similar motion as there is in a ‘retting dialect.’ There are similar spaces within the motion of the book’s user turning the pages. But the page is not a single space. One of my favourite aspects of working with fabric is the misty transparency of silk and cotton. In this book we move across moments, through moments, in and amongst page turns. In each page there are glimpses of the past and the future. This book is both a sequence of spaces and a sequence of moments. It is all moments and all time, all pages at once, moving in and out of sightlines. The story in this book speaks to a sense of being in New Zealand and my ancestral land of Scotland at the same time. In this way, the book’s content and its form speak together.
He says, ‘A book is a space-time sequence’
This book is titled ‘jasmine 01’ (there will likely be a number of jasmine books – that too is a space-time sequence). The book is smaller, but the pages are more opaque, time moves differently. The pages are thinner, and sometimes they stick meaning pages can be skipped. We move through a sequence of plants, a journey on a bush walk. The plants were collected along a walk in Cornwallis Karangahape. The background bundle dye is from flowers my Nana’s garden, the garden I grew up in, and the text moves between my childhood, the playhouse with its heavy burden of jasmine crushing its roof, to finding jasmine in the wild on this recent walk. Jasmine was first found growing in the wild in the 1990s. It is now classed as an environmental weed, and it is subject to the Biosecurity Act because it smothers the growth of native plants. The nonsequential timeline of ‘Jasmine 01’ combined with the intralinear story means its content and its form speak together. It is a space-time sequence that intersplices these times and impacts.
He says, ‘Contrary to popular opinion a writer does not write books.’ He says ‘In the old art the writer writes texts. In the new art the writer makes books.’
I am a writer who makes books. In ‘passing through’ the poem writes the space. It is based on a poem titled ‘Crossing places, moving in and out of the world’ and this book, with its bundle dyed plant impressions, its ethereal iron water notions, its threshold of visible and partially visible text, forms an atmosphere of passing through a liminal space. It is based on the poem because the whole poem isn’t needed. The book’s form, its spaces, moments, motions, sequences, action render the other words of the poem redundant. The content and the form speak together. The book’s form is part of the text: in making a book I am writing a text.
He says ‘The old art takes no heed of reading. The new art creates specific reading conditions.’
In making books with fabric, I am creating specific reading conditions, specific ways to engage and traverse with books, and their image, poetry, and story.
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At the end of the world, there are stars. At the end of October, in the dark of the early black night, before midnight but long after the sun has dropped below the horizon, I was cradled by red rocks, my eyes adjusting to the effulgence of deep time. These pin pricks in the black blanket, these eyes thrown up into the heavens, sharpened, not into brighter, starker lights, but into a wider context of thick undulating clouds and luminous waves. The ocean waves lap at the stony beach and the moon, waxing crescent, Ouenuku, lights up the wave crests, sky and ocean reflecting. I lay there, stones protruding into my back, wearing every layer I took to Wellington and still lightly shivering, while a camera beside me clicked its long exposures with infinity focus. These stunning astrophotographs were taken that night by my friend Sam Wilson, shared with permission.
So beautiful Makyla, I've added those books to my books to look out for.