Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for June, 2008
The prophetic voice
“Protesters are everywhere, but I think the world is desperately in need of prophets, those little voices that can point us toward another future. [...] Protesters are still on the fringes like satellites, revolving around the system. But prophets and poets lead us into a new world, beyond simply yelling at the old one. In many ways, protesters fit into the dominant system, legitimizing the current order with carefully compartmentalized dissent. A one-dimensional society can absorb dissent in a way that even further empowers its domination.”
— Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution, p.309-10
What is the prophetic voice that Nehemiah & Blake seeks in its writers? Shane Claiborne’s definition sums it up: It’s “those little voices that can point us toward another future” and that go “beyond simply yelling” at the system.
“The Story So Far” is the story we are beginning
The best bits of the part online game, “part competition, part creative-writing exercise” entitled The Story So Far end up as “rare hand-stitched hardbacks.” It is also Cory Doctorow’s fictional envisioning of a community-driven publishing future. The quote below comes from Doctorow’s story (published by The Bookseller) and couldn’t more aptly and succinctly describe the story Nehemiah & Blake finds itself wanting to begin:
“I’ll tell you how,” Arthur said again, clearly enjoying the chance to unfurl one of his old, well-oiled stories. “It was all about connecting kids up with their local neighbourhoods and the tastes there. Kids know what their friends want to read. We had them curate their own anthologies of the best, most suitable material from The Story So Far, put all that local knowledge to work. The right book for the right person in the right place. You’ve got to give them a religious experience before you can lure them into coming to church regular.”
Fiction as “lectio divina”
Karen Armstrong notes in her book The Bible (2007) that lectio divina is the “peaceful, leisurely perusal of the [scriptural] text” in which a reader finds “a quiet place in [the] mind [...] to hear the Word” (128). In lectio divina, scripture is not studied as a historical-linguistic text on the one hand, or as a fundamental proof text on the other, but as a prophetic window upon the here and now. This style of “reading” was developed by monks at the end of the pagan Roman Empire as a means of spiritual formation, whereby the “rhythms, imagery and teaching of the Bible became the substratum of their spirituality, built up incrementally and undramatically day by day, year by year, in silent, regular meditation” (ibid). The purpose of such an inworking was to be able to live as close to the movement of the Spirit as possible, perceiving the Spirit’s words, thoughts, groans and inner desires. The daily liturgy, with its scripture readings and Eucharist became, in Karen Armstrong’s terms, the illiterate “laity’s “lectio divina” (130) by which the lay folk were incrementally and undramatically brought to the knowledge of Christian faith.
Today, illiteracy is again beginning to pervade the lower stratum of UK society. But this illiteracy is also an illiteracy at the story level on the one hand, where the Christ story has all but passed out of knowledge for the vast majority of people in the UK, and at the “reading” level on the other, where liberals and conservatives jockey for media positioning as they joust with their respective historical-linguistic interpretations and fundamental literal proofs of scripture. For neither side is the scriptural text a prophetic breathing into contemporary reality, but a dead text to dig up or eat. As a consequence, the laity have not been nourished with the Christ story. The Bible goes unread, and its interpretation is put back in the hands of religious authority. Yet It was just this authority that the first monks sought to escape when they went into the desert. Karen Armstrong makes the insightful point that the beginning of the monastic tradition coincides roughly with the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire (115). The monks became the new martyrs, not martyrs to death through persecution, but martyrs to state established religion. While the church developed its society-controlling doctrines, the monks lived and breathed the texts that were eventually to form the corpus of the Bible.
If the religious authorities of our day are the liberal and conservative theologians (consider the current Anglican spat over whether to be at Lambeth, or not to be at Lambeth), then who are the monks? Well, if lectio divina is the peaceful, leisurely perusal of a text, what text today but the novel better fits that description? And what community today but the reading group more aptly describes a group of monks reading a text in unison in search of its rhythms, imagery and teaching for internal meditation.
There is some truth to the argument that the novel replaced the Bible as the culture’s central “text” and that the literary canon has since Victorian times been put forward as a surrogate of scripture. Literary theory has been justly unkind to this proposal, and the English canon itself is in as much disrepute as the Biblical text. As such, few today read the Bible, while not many more read the canon. Rather, reading groups have taken fiction into their own hands:
If 500 of this country’s most fervent readers have got it right, the past 25 years have been a golden age for classic fiction, the past 15 years have been even better and the past five years have verged on the platinum.
[...]This perspective will be news to most critics, academics and publishers, although publishers will be grateful for the boost for their newer titles. But it is the firm view of 48 book reading groups across Britain.
The reading laity have become the monks, and the literary authorities, the dogmatics. Freed then from both their roots to scripture as a story stock, and from an authorising canon, today’s novels are read “lectio saecularis” by reading groups. Nevertheless, the rise of reading groups in the UK shows that the novel remains the English culture’s central de-centred “text”, which means that somewhere inside that “text” hide its scriptural traces.
It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish works of fiction, of which Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is the first, that track these traces back through the canon to the scriptures. This desire is based on the deeper desire to combine lectio saecularis with lectio divina in a way that sees the reading laity mastering both and then passing on those reading skills to the illiterate so that they can join in.
If you have any interest in finding out more about this project, then please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
Fiction as liturgy
What is liturgy but a plot along which a story can be strung. Yet the story being strung is not a mere story. It is a story in the aid of worship, and hence a story of spiritual import to both the individual and the community, for liturgy is, after all, a personal act of worship publicly enacted with others that leads to a communal restatement of belief. The liturgical plot is what governs the pace and drama of the story, both for the individual and the community. By tying its varying movements to the calender, the liturgical plot brings our participation to the story.
Can fiction enact this same liturgical same function? It is towards this ideal that Apocalypse of Jude strives. Its liturgical structure melds together the pagan liturgical calendar with the Church’s, beginning at Easter and ending at Christmas, while taking in Whitsuntide, Spring Equinox, Halloween and Midsummer along the way. On the side of the Church liturgy, Jude and Caul somewhat unknowingly work through a liturgy of the sacraments, thereby bringing the reader into participation with the liturgical story. Furthermore, the biblical texts of Jude and Revelation that are mixed into the overall text will hopefully drive a communal discussion of the fictional use of these texts, which should in turn encourage a collective restatement of belief on the part of readers (the double entendre on restatement is intended, for a restatement is always one made anew). Also present in Apocalypse of Jude, however, is the pagan liturgy of the vegetation ritual in which the reader is invited to participate through reading the integrated text of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Here Paul acts as high priest, not in pagan worship of the god Dionysus however, but rather of himself.
This focus on the self as centre of worship is the travesty of liturgy. This travesty however, Jason Clark notes, is the primary liturgical plot that people in the UK participate in today. Clark calls it the liturgy of consumer culture where “our weeks are organised around the consumer calendar” and our participation driven by a “demand for obedience from our wallets,” all in the service of identity formation through the aesthetic acquisition of ever more desirable goods which will attach to us the mediated attributes of a godlike status. Clark goes on to note that the liturgy most discredited and forgotten in the UK is the Christian liturgy, in which is told the story of Christ in aid of the worship of Christ, a man who eschews everything about consumer culture.
It is odd then, that much Christian spirituality today reflects more the values of the consumer-culture liturgy than its own. And if the consumer-culture spirituality is a new-age spirituality that piggybacks on the pagan liturgical tradition, then much Christian spirituality is mere new-age spirituality. Jason Clark argues however, that Christian spirituality should rather be seeking for a reconnection with a liturgical tradition more closely connected with that of the Book of Common Prayer, and which can act as “the door way to the living out and forming of our lives around the reality of the universe that is the life of [the counter consumer-culture] Jesus.”
English literature began and founded many of its roots in serving a Christian liturgical function for both the individual and the community of believers. If those are the roots of English literature, there is no reason to believe that fiction cannot serve that same function today, and help both the individual and the community of believers reconnect with a life that celebrates love of God and neighbour above self. It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish such works, of which Apocalypse of Jude is humbly put forward as an imperfect prototype.
If you would like to know more of Nehemiah & Blake’s vision, please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
Reflections on “Deep Reading”
Is Deep Reading under threat? Is Google making us stupid? I start with these two questions for very good reason. The first is a post heading from readysteadybook.com. The second is a headline to an Atlantic.com article. I came by the first link via Nehemiah & Blake’s bloglines subscriptions, which led me to the second, which, by virtue of reading, has led me to write this post. What we have here then is a tangible chain of associations that suggests a number of relations going on in my head in a way that it is impossible for a bibliography at the end of a book to show. What makes this chain even more tangible is that the reader can follow this chain (via hyperlinks) and so engage with a neural pathway, again in the way a well-indexed bibliography does not allow. What is engaged in this process of online reading is not a reading that seeks to make sense of a well-structured narrative, or argument. Rather it is a reading that seeks to make sense of what lies in the hyperspace between jumps.
The former type of reading is what Nicholas Carr, the writer of Is Google making us stupid?, would understand as “Deep Reading”. While the latter is what he might term as a distracted reading, a reading that developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. would argue promotes a style of reading that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above content. This, Carr argues, favours Google:
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
It would take a naive fool to dismiss this analysis of what the Googleplex desires of us. The same can be said for old-fashioned publishers: It’s in their economic interest to drive us towards books baked like cheap supermarket bread that leave us far less than satisfied in the depths of the human heart. But while Google may desire that we “flit from link to link,” it is important to remember that Google is a function of the hyperlink, not the other way around! Without the hyperlink, no Google. In fact, it is curious that many people, including Carr, track the development of civilisation as following this pattern: development of writing, the printing press, the internet. This is how Carr outlines the current way of thinking:
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom.
I enjoin with that scepticism and suggest that perhaps this sequence should rather read as follows: development of writing, movable type (of which the typewriter/keyboard is the final end), the hyperlink. I don’t doubt that much will be, and already has been lost in this new shift and can sympathise with Carr when he opines that “[T]he Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different.” I am, after all, born of that culture of the printed book. Yet I am also one who is born again into the hyperlinked text. Just like for anyone who is born again, for one born of the book, there is a tough casting off of the past, and a just as tough taking on the new hyperlinked text. But rather than merely offering a “flit-ful” type of reading encouraged by the economics of the Googleplex, the hyperlinked text offers a dynamic new type of reading that offers a tangible map of what Carr calls “the intellectual vibrations” that reading “set[s] off within our own minds” so that when “we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas” from what we read, there is a trackback available, that allows us to “see” how these mental jumps were made, and provide the basis for a radical reinterpretation of the knowledge that the printed book has given us. Moreover, this hyperlinked method of reading will impact the printed book, whereby “books” will emerge that will “mimic” the hyperlinked nature of the Internet by providing “cross-referenced texts” that allow the reader to jump from one part of the text to another to see how it interlinks as a text. In fact, this book has already been around with us from a long time in the form of the cross-reference Bible, where verses of one text are cross-referenced with verses of another text, so that the reader can have a greater insight to the full Bible itself.
It is ironic in the literary sphere where the Bible is often seen as little more than an obtuse, irrelevant reference scarcely referenced any longer, that the Bible presents it with a model for future works of fiction. It is upon this biblical model which Nehemiah & Blake’s forthcoming printed version of Apocalypse of Jude is based. In its current online form, Apocalypse of Jude is a hyperlinked fiction that offers the reader two mixes to choose from: The Wasteland Mix and The Purgatory Mix, the former following the trajectory of T.S. Eliot’s poem, the latter, the plot of Dante’s Purgatory. The intention is for one mix to illuminate the other mix so that the reader feels the vibrations of both mixes working to the depths of the heart, while allowing the reader a tangible link to the source of those vibrations so that exploration can take place. Nehemiah & Blake trusts that the printed work will have the same effect.
Nehemiah & Blake: A vision
In the 7th Century, the monks of Whitby Abbey gave voice to an illiterate farmhand who believed he could not sing, by transcribing a song commanded of him by an angel in a dream-vision. That poem we now call Caedmon’s Song, and it stands at the fount of English literature, a tradition born from a prophetic call to glory God and God’s creation. But the monks went further than just writing down Caedmon’s words. They taught him to read scripture so he could compose further songs in praise of God.
It is in this beginning that Nehemiah & Blake finds its own calling: To rebuild the walls of this prophetic tradition safeguarded in the monasteries of England until their dissolution by Henry VIII in the 16th Century. But also to rebuild the walls of literacy that are breaking in so many communities across England today, believing that in these communities lie ordinary people like Caedmon, who are struggling with illiteracy or semi-literacy, but to whom God wishes to vouchsafe visions: visions that will bring hope, visions that will bring joy, and visions that will write against injustice.
Like the monks of Whitby, Nehemiah & Blake wants to be there when these visions happen. Nehemiah & Blake is thus seeking to be a community publishing project (but is not yet) that will not only publish prophetic literary works of writers in England, but also the writing that emerges directly out of a community of writers and non-writers physically living with each other and engaged with the immediate community around them. Particularly, Nehemiah & Blake desires to be engaged with, teaching in, and publishing works of a community where the problems of illiteracy and semi-literacy are fuelling poverty, sadness and injustice.
Unravelling the mystery of Laodicea
In the dedication of Apocalypse of Jude, Richard Wasserfall writes:
[Apocalypse of Jude] contains the mystery of the seventh star that John the Revelator saw, the mystery of the seventh golden lampstand that stands before the throne. The star is the angel and the lampstand is the church of Laodicea.
More simply put, Apocalypse of Jude contains the mystery of the church of Laodicea. It is worth quoting the entire passage dedicated to Laodicea in Revelation before seeking to get a grip on what Richard Wasserfall believes that mystery might mean:
“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” (Rev 3:14-22; NIV)
The church at Laodicea is most famous for its lukewarm character, which in the parlance of a more modern age might be construed as “cool”: too hip for its own hop. It is a characteristic that Richard Wasserfall believes is symptomatic in the broader English church as it has sought to make itself relevant to a consumer society on the one hand, and to an increasingly pluralist society on the other. However, too often verse 15 – “So, because you are lukewarm–neither hot nor cold–I am about to spit you out of my mouth” – has been (ab)used by old-school evangelism to force an inflexible, fundamentalist version of the Jesus story down the throats of believers who have been seeking out a new relevance for Jesus in the UK. Richard Wasserfall has admitted to Nehemiah & Blake that he was similarly blindsided by this narrow exegesis when setting out to write Apocalypse of Jude. But through writing, he has come to believe that how this passage on Laodicea relates to the church in England lies not in its being used to berate those who seek a fresh relevancy, but in its ability to critique how these believers have gone about seeking relevancy.
Wasserfall believes that over the past 40 years or so, UK believers have sought to justify their increasingly “old-fashioned” faith through becoming more materially “alike” to the people around them. In so doing, they have become just like them: enriched through property, goods and equity. What has been dropped in the process of becoming relevant has been the Jesus hard-sell. The shedding of this sales technique is what the old-schoolers like to drive home as being central to the failure of the modern church in England. But this is not what is being said when the whole passage on Laodicea is taken under consideration, as Richard Wasserfall described to Nehemiah & Blake:
When you read the whole passage, and ask yourself, what does Jesus want from Laodicea, you find out that he wants to eat! “Here I am!” Jesus says. “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” Suddenly, you’re asking yourself, whose door is Jesus knocking on? Who does he want to eat with? And again the text gives you the answer. He wants to eat with the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”
Realising that sent me back to the gospels, because there’s a parable where Jesus talks of a great banquet in which a man invites many guests. But their RSVPs all come back with excuses about why they can’t make it. So the man becomes angry and tells his servant to go out and find “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” and bring them in. Now the man is God, and Jesus is the servant who goes out looking for the outcasts to eat with his master. And here Jesus is in Laodicea knocking on the doors of the “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked,” who in material terms are loaded.
So what’s the mystery? The mystery is that the “cool” gospel of material relevance is extreme poverty. You don’t see it, because you are blind to the fact that the extreme poverty you see in the mediated image of the “global south” “other” is actually an image of your soul. You are numb to this fact because you have deferred its material consequences onto this “other”. This is what has happened to the people of Laodicea in my book Apocalypse of Jude.
The town in which Apocalypse of Jude is set has become a type of Laodicea: a haven of properties for the wealthy in a beautiful landscape ruled over by two real-estate “warlords”. Yet on its outskirts lies a sprawling slum of poverty, and within its boundaries, the characters experience not its material charms, but its spiritual death and decay. Paul seeks to engineer the downfall of this system in which the town’s people have their spiritual poverty exposed to the material horrors of such a poverty. Yet Paul is someone motivated, not out of love, but out of rage and envy. The church in this Laodicea has all but disappeared under the veneer of material wealth. For Jude it exists now only as an institution awaiting its antichrist to finally demolish it.
Both these story tangents offer depressing outcomes for the mystery of Laodicea. The Biblical text, however, offers hope in the form of a promise to those who overcome the trap that Laodicea springs. And this hope is best encapsulated in the story by Caul and Audrey who are found by a group of believers who themselves are beginning to give up the quest for material relevance and beginning to experience the apocalypse of spiritual poverty going on in themselves.
This reading of the Laodicean mystery by Richard Wasserfall makes his offering up of Apocalypse of Jude as a blessing to “the churches of Albion” all the more pertinent as the church in the UK becomes increasingly aware of its own spiritual poverty. But its pertinence goes further as the UK enters a period in which its economic prosperity, built on the back of a property boom, is entering a fallout that is threatening the lives of many with the impact of material poverty. In this sense, Nehemiah & Blake believes Apocalypse of Jude is a prophetic utterance of both warning and hope for the English church to speed up its transformation into a body that can feed, clothe and heal “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” so that as a body itself it will no longer be “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” and thus not spat out.
Towards defining an archetext, part II
The Old English word “arche” is derived from Old French, and means ark (as in Noah’s ark) in modern usage. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes the following examples
c1205 LAY. 26 Noe & Sem, Japhet & Cham and heore four wiues
e mid heom weren on archen.c1230 Ancr. R. 334 Eihte i
an noe was in to
e arche cumen. a1300 Cursor M. 1843 On
The OED also cites this same usage for the Jewish ark of the covenant which held the law of God, Israel’s most sacred text. An archetext then is, additional to its previous meanings, a form of textual ark which holds a crucial legacy in terms of knowledge for those that come after a devastation, as well as being a receptacle for sacred texts that hold a community together.
At the same time, an archetext can be considered as a form of arche-writing suggested by Jacques Derrida in his seminal work, Of Grammatology. This arche-writing can be understood as writing which
“refers to a more generalised notion of writing that insists that the breach that the written introduces between what is intended to be conveyed and what is actually conveyed, is typical of an originary breach that afflicts everything one might wish to keep sacrosanct, including the notion of self-presence.”¹
More plainly put, one might consider that “originary breach” as “original sin” in which everything that Adam and Eve might have wished to keep sacrosanct – Eden and a self-present God – underwent a spacial differing – exit from Eden – and a temporal deferral – having to commune with God through sacrifice.
Because of this differing and deferral, Derrida considers meaning never to be present in a text, not even present to the author themselves. It is always deferred into the future and subject to that future’s whims.
“[B]ut when that so-called future is itself ‘present’ [...] its meaning is equally not realised, but subject to yet another future that can also never be present.”
This brings us into the realm and nature of the prophetic. Those who would have the Bible fixed in meaning for perpetuity must fail to remember that concerning the salvation of Jesus Christ, “the prophets [...] searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing,” (1 Peter 1:10-11). Here we have the meaning of prophecy not available in full to the prophets themselves. Nevertheless, the messiah they prophesied, in falling under the whims of a post-exilic Israel, was re-prophesied as coming as a mighty slayer of Israel’s enemies. Yet when Jesus Christ came, he was recognised as the messiah by a small group of disciples who in turn radically reinterpreted the prophets to create a new future of a coming kingdom. This process of reinterpreting and re-prophesying into a future has continued throughout Christianity’s history and continues today, as the Biblical text allows itself as ark (arche), archetype, archeological specimen, architectural construction and corpus of writing that accounts for its “presence” through the arche-writing breach, to be so practiced upon.
The Bible then is a form of ideal archetext in the same way as the Internet might be considered as a form of idea arch-e-text, always allowing its treasure stores to cross over the flood of human history into a future present to be sent again on its path over the flood.
Notes:
1. Quotes come from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What’s in a book that I should buy it?
There’s a trick to the question asked in the post title. It lies with the verb. It should be “read”. But it isn’t. It’s “buy”. Why? Because to read a book, one by and large has to buy it. Reading is intrinsically bound up in the economic cycle. It is a fact not lost on Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveller. There are as many ways to buy a book as there are to skin a cat. Charles Lambert on the Guardian book blog describes a delightful, idiosyncratic method of buying books in Italy 30 years ago that was akin to visiting your grocer:
“Customers were served by an assistant behind a wide bare wooden counter. They would tell the assistant what they wanted and he or she (usually he) would disappear into the back of the shop, wrap the book exquisitely in sheets of pre-cut paper and tie it with ribbon.”
As Nehemiah & Blake was reading this, it struck that this is not dissimilar from buying a book online from say, Amazon. You go to Amazon in the same sense Lambert once might have gone to his book-grocer: if you don’t know the book you want, you don’t go there. Then you buy the book, Amazon goes to its warehouse to find and wrap it, and then dispatches it to you.
The advantage for Amazon over the book-grocer is, as Robert McCrum recently pointed out, that Amazon is a global book-grocer that has united a global book market and changed the way books are marketed, and hence the way books are bought.
But what’s in a book that I should buy it? And is it to be found in a book trade that functions as a signifier of the market economy? In such an economy, the book is a commodity and a statistic on a logistics database set up to ensure the most cost-effective production with the largest possible profit. A book’s content is irrelevant in all aspects but perhaps in its ability to make a sale. As to what sells however, is a very imprecise science. Selling books then is a system of probabilities. Some forms of content, because of a proven genre- or author-driven track record, present book publishers with higher percentage odds. The greater the number of high-percentage books published, the less room for risk to be taken on perceived low-percentage books.
The first thing that is in a book to make me buy it then is low risk. Low risk for the publisher in terms of securing a profit on the book, and low risk for the reader, whose reading enjoyment has a higher probability of being satisfied with a book that conforms by and large to established convention. The publisher desires the money in order to publish more books. The reader desires value for pounds spent, and thus relies on the publishing industry to provide that sense of money being well spent.
As books are seen as commodities by the market economy, those working within the requirements of the market economy take up this definition for books. The OED defines commodity in two senses, one, as a raw or primary product that can be traded, like sugar, and two, as a useful or valuable thing, such as time. One might add to this definition, a product that is ubiquitous and affordable to almost all, such as a computer, or car. Thus the book in developed societies has become a cheap, ubiquitous raw, primary product of inestimable value and use.
The second thing then that is in a book to make me buy it is its social equivalence to food. In fact, the food trade and the book trade are almost synonymous: 2-for-1 battery-farmed chickens at Tesco = 2-for-1 battery-farmed books at Tesco; an organic, free change chicken at Waitrose = An “original, free-thinking” book from Waterstones; your weekly veg box ordered online = your monthly shopping cart from Amazon, etc etc. Of course, the organic/mass-farmed, free-range/battery-farmed debate has yet to deliver its verdict on whether there is a significant difference in nutrition. But the growing problem of obesity in Britain, the environmental issues, the food miles, the rich/poor divide in the affordability of quality food, the education about food, the school dinners all make for interesting comparison when applied to the book trade: the growing problem of illiteracy, the environmental impact of publishing, the rich/poor literacy divide that streams our children into varying levels of education, and the role of books in schools. The difference is that the food industry’s role in the politics of food has been pushed high onto the media agenda. The book publishing trade’s role in the politics of reading remains by and large a small in-house debate. And as far as I can account for, very little has been done, compared to food, to raise the awareness of what role the publishing trade plays in perpetuating a cycle of unsustainable pulping and paper-manufacturing that in turn leads to entrenched forms of poverty in countries where these processes take place.
Moreover, if the book is a commodity, then it will not go unnoticed that many current commodity prices are sky high – gold, copper, oil, food. So is paper, and that means books will continue to be dearer. When that happens, major companies seek to offset rising commodity prices by driving down labour cost so that they can continue to pass on discounted prices to customers. Which in turn means, more higher percentage books at supermarket prices with supermarket quality at the expense of human quality of life for those who work in the physical production of books. This is not to mention the environmental impact of books.
The thesis behind mass production has always been that it is cheaper to make more than less, even if you sell less than you make. This is particularly true of book publishing, where there are always returns. James Bridle of booktwo.org estimates that for some publishers this return rate is as high as 50 percent. He notes that:
“half of all books printed in the UK are never read. And they’re not redistributed either, but returned to the publishers or otherwise disposed of, usually pulped or simply placed in landfill.”
On top of this, Bridle quotes David Reay, an environmental scientist who estimated that “in terms of its contribution to global warming, UK publishing in effect puts an extra 100,000 cars on our roads.
On the basis of all this then, it would at least appear that there is not much in a book that would make me buy it: not much in the way of risk-taking content that might force me to reevaluate my position on the world and its goings-on; nor much in the way of that would alleviate those goings-on. To conclude, Nehemiah & Blake concedes that much of this essay is an oversimplification of the book publishing industry, and that there is much afoot in the way of confronting these issues. The purpose of this essay is simply to put forward a perspective on the issue in the hope that it will contribute to the ground swell of seeing the publishing industry radically interrogate its own wheel in the hope of it being sustainably re-invented.
What’s in a publisher’s name?
The name Nehemiah & Blake draws together the incongruous figures of Nehemiah, the Old Testament prophet who rebuilt Jerusalem’s broken walls, and William Blake, England’s 18th century visionary poet who wished to transform Albion into a spiritual Jerusalem.
They are incongruous because they bring such contraries to the name. Nehemiah was a man of orthodox faith in God, deep prayerfulness and was committed to rebuilding not only Jerusalem’s walls, but its sacred traditions within them. He was ironically also an immigrant, Jewish in race, but born and brought up in the Persian court, and yet with a deep passion for the traditions of his ancestral lands. Blake on the other hand was London born, a man of radical dissent and unorthodox faith in God. He deeply disliked both English Christian tradition and English literary tradition and sought in his work to dismantle both by rebuilding a Christological vision based on England’s druidic past. Blake was in essence calling for a return to a tradition whose roots, bar a few fragments, had been uprooted in the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.
One can carry on with these contraries: Nehemiah was cupbearer to the King of the Persian empire and thus politically well-connected and well-resourced. Blake was a journeyman who had little social capital and who died virtually unknown. Nehemiah was an expert at project management; Blake failed at every attempt to publish his work. Nehemiah was deeply concerned with family values; Blake questioned the very basis of the family structure. Nehemiah lacked for nothing; Blake was in constant need of his friend’s charity. Nehemiah was a man of great boldness in the face of fear; Blake was his whole life subject to fits of nervous anxiety.
Yet there is an historical irony in the stories of both men. For the project that Nehemiah started – the rebuilding of Jewish traditions within the sanctity of Jerusalem’s walls – paradoxically culminated not in a vibrant faith in God, but in a legalistic system of such hypocrisy that left Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. In the case of Blake, the reversal is perhaps all the more extraordinary, in that over the past two hundred odd years, the depth of his vision has worked itself deeper into the core of the English canon, with it perhaps having played a vital part in the unsettling and dismantling of that canon over the past fifty odd years.
As a name, then, Nehemiah & Blake has not been chosen to definitively define the publishing project that it names. Rather, through the coming together of contraries, the name seeks to point prophetically to its messianic possibilities while at the same time reminding us of humanity’s sorely failed attempts at fulfilling these dreams.
