August 2009
9 posts
Lines in the Sand
More mind-tickling calligraphy via the marvelous Ministry of Type: this the work of Capetown letterer Andrew van der Merwe, whose medium is beach sand.
Van der Merwe spent several years developing tools to incise letterforms in sand without leaving the ragged ridges and dikes that are familiar to anyone who’s dragged a stick along the beach. Merwe’s instruments carve v-shaped...
“If we consider the occasions on which the Iliad-poet himself appeals to the...”
– E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 80–1. Dodds shows us that the urge of the letter is primordial: a retrospective hunger that is twin to prospect. Like the rationalism that was its supposed daughter, the urge to write and read was driven as much by a lively and mystical religious...
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mystic writing pads of memory
To Freud, typical writing media like the paper notepad and the slate offered imperfect versions of memory: either they are too finite and fixed (as in the former case) or too ephemeral (the latter). Conventional writing fell short as a “materialized porton of (the) mnemic apparatus”; “an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces,” he wrote,...
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Scratching the surface
“Now, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it….” Sonnet 71 is traditionally understood as defining the zenith—or the nadir—of the recklessly selfless path Shakespeare’s speaker charts throughout the cycle. Here he importunes the beloved to forget him when he’s gone, warning that their association will only cause him trouble with the “wise...
More Graven Names: Shakespeare, Sonnet 71
No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you hall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world with vildest worms to dwell; Nay, if you read this line, remember not The hand that writ it, for I love you so, That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, If thinking on me then should make you woe. O if (I say) you look upon this verse, When I (perhaps)...
"for a scratch'd name to teach..."
A Valediction of My Name, in the Window
John Donne
MY name engraved herein Doth contribute my firmness to this glass, Which ever since that charm hath been As hard, as that which graved it was; Thine eye will give it price enough, to mock The diamonds of either rock.
II.
‘Tis much that glass should be As all-confessing, and through-shine as I; ‘Tis more that it shows thee to...
Tabula Rasa
Commonly attributed to John Locke, the concept of the mind as a tabula rasa, a ”blank slate” as a description of the human mind before it receives the imprint of experience, is deeply rooted in scribal culture. Perhaps it was first articulated by Aristotle in the de Anima where he describes the originary mind as an “uninscribed tablet.” But tabula rasa in fact means an...