Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for August, 2008
thoughts on caedmon
When Caedmon was taught to read and write, he not only became literate in the basic sense of the word, but literate in the spiritual and prophetic tradition of scripture. In other words, he became literate in the way that anyone who learns to read and write becomes literate – in the texts and the belief systems inherent in those texts. If the vision of Nehemiah & Blake is to rebuild the ancient foundation upon which Caedmon’s literacy was founded, then the vision of Nehemiah & Blake is to rebuild a spiritual literacy. If a spiritual literacy is intimately connected with learning to read and write, then those most likely to learn are those poor in the skill of literacy. If lack of literacy is closely connected to levels of poverty, then lack of spiritual literacy is itself a form of poverty. Those, however, with high levels of literacy other than spiritual are unlikely to recognise the need of the latter in themselves. Jesus said, however, that he came not to heal the righteous, but the sick.
dangerous levels of literacy
Literacy is a very fluid concept. If a definition for literacy is being able to read, then being able to read is a skill of many diverse talents. In the medieval world, literacy was founded on the art of grammar – not a learning of the rules of language, but on the art of speaking properly and of interpreting the poets (no wonder our continued notion that literacy and reading literature are inexplicably interlinked). Today, what constitutes literacy is something quite different, and in the midst of changing radically. Consider the following quip from the BBC Today website:
Once Biggles and Just William captured the imagination of teenage boys – now computer games and texting seem to occupy their time.
As Ian Rankin notes on the programme, texting and following the prompts of computer games “is a form of literacy among teenage boys.” Anyone familiar or not with the language of texting knows that that reading a txt msg is an act of interpretation. Texting foregrounds the fact that reading itself is an act of interpretation, a fact sometimes lost on those of us who are “literate” in the intricacies of standardised phonetics. Interpretation is therefore a core element of literacy, and the level of interpretation closely related to the level of literacy.
Considering how thorny the issue of textual interpretation is in any field of knowledge, a low level of literacy premises a dangerous thing. While for many young boys leaving the UK education system with a reading age of eleven, the dangerous thing looming is poverty, a classified internal MI5 report on radicalisation in the UK finds another dangerous low level of literacy at work in the UK:
Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could actually be regarded as religious novices.
It is notable that the MI5 use of the terms radicalisation and violent extremism refer to (Islamic) terrorism. But these terms could equally apply to boys leaving school with a reading age of eleven and finding there way into gangland lives. In both cases, it is the inability to interpret with a level of sophistication the texts by which they are able to interpret the world that creates the dangerous circumstance for themselves and their communities.
the internet ≈ the medieval manuscript
a theory:
the internet vs. the book
the book vs. the medieval manuscript
ergo, the internet ≈ the medieval manuscript
…
Much is going on around the blogosphere regarding Nick Carr’s essay in Atlantic magazine, “Is Google making us stupid?“. Nehemiah & Blake has commented. Kevin Kelly’s post, Fate of the Book, provides a very useful perspective of the internet vs. the book debate as it has developed since the mid 1990s. Sven Birkerts, to whom Kelly’s post was directed, makes the interesting point that “[c]yberspace is centrifugal; reading is centripetal. Nehemiah & Blake, however, would like to refocus the internet/book debate somewhat by considering the medieval manuscript. (btw, the start of this interesting train of links comes from booktwo.org, a wonderful site focussed on the future on the book.)
There is a lot to be said for considering old technologies in order to get one’s head around new technologies, particularly if one takes a circular view of history. Consider the following.
Each medieval manuscript was made up of folios or pages to create an individual object. No two manuscripts were the same. Furthermore, manuscripts often linked together otherwise unrelated narratives for the pleasure of the reader. For instance, the only surviving manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is bound together with two Latin treatises and the Christian narrative poems Pearl, Purity and Patience. A manuscript would also have been transcribed, glossed and illuminated by one or more scribes, each of whom would have made errors in their work. The work of the rubicators – those who would write the glosses and headings – would furthermore have reflected their individual idiosyncrasies, as would the transcribing methods of the scribes and the artistic methods of the illuminators.
Altogether, the medieval manuscript would be everything a printed book was not: non-uniform. It was print culture that imposed upon our reading habits the conventions of uniformity that we demand of our books today. No publisher today publishes more than one version of a novel. Imagine the furore today if Bloomsbury published two versions of a Harry Potter book simultaneously. Readers would want to know which was the “authorative” version.
Now consider the web site. It too is made up of individual pages (each with its own url) that are (hyper)linked together to form an individual object. The web site is non-reproducible. The idea of reproducing an identical web site elsewhere on the web is not only pointless (one home url is sufficient for anyone to access your page), but impossible (any copy requires different url’s for each page it duplicates). Moreover, the website can link together any number of disparate web pages from across the internet through the use of the hyperlink. But no website is very likely to have the same agglomeration of links.
Carrying on the similarities, while many websites do aim to reproduce the uniformity of the book across its pages, particularly those with dedicated webmasters, the majority of the deep web is produced by content creators who are less concerned with uniformity and more interested in the delivery of information, allowing for a vast scope for error, idiosyncrasy, opinion and design ethic to enter into the flow of information.
There are other similarities, just as their are many dissimilarities between the medieval manuscript and the internet. Feel free to comment and mention any you might think of. Nevertheless, the similarities in terms of production between the respective technologies I think warrants the investigation of the older technology that Nehemiah & Blake seeks to pursue.
Why “not-for-profit”?
It is commonly known that there is enough food in this world to feed everyone comfortably. The problem is not a shortage of food. The problem is the distribution system. People go hungry because they live outside or on the extremities of the distribution system. They starve because they are unable to use (for a number of varying reasons) their talents and resources to enter into that system.
It is the same case for many many good writers. The problem is not a shortage of publishers. The problem is the distribution system whose focus is on bottom line. Writers, as a result, go unpublished because they live outside or on the extremities of the distribution system. Their God-given gift to write starves because they are unable to use (for a number of varying reasons) their talents and resources to enter into that system. If they are able to enter it, they receive next to nothing from it.
Nehemiah & Blake believes however that to be hindered or not allowed to exercise one’s God-given talents for an equitable wage on the basis on market economics is wrong. In other words, Nehemiah & Blake believes that if you discover your primary vocation to be that of a writer, but find out that your writing does not conform to the wants of market economics, you should nevertheless be allowed to practice, develop, master and live by your writing. Nehemiah & Blake believes this on the basis that your gift for writing is God-given, and would have not been so given, unless it was meant to be the work by which to sustain your life.
While many independent publishers exist that do a fine job of publishing “difficult” writers, very few can provide their writers a “working wage”. It is for this reason that Nehemiah & Blake is setting up a “not-for-profit” publishing venture focussed on investigating the medieval monastery model as a means by which writers can primarily write for a living while being supported by a community, so that the writers can in turn support the community through the fruit of their writing.
Taking the vision forward
I wrote previously on the vision for Nehemiah & Blake. It is time to move that vision forward. When Henry VIII dissolved all the monasteries in England, he ended an entire way of life, not only for the monks, but for the communities that were gathered around those abbeys and monasteries. In terms of land, much of the confiscated land went into the hands of favoured nobles who brought about a much more commercially-focussed land tenancy. In terms of writing, the dissolution forced the scribes out onto the street, who then had to fend for themselves by hiring out their services. The professional writer was in the process of being born, a process that led to Shakespeare. Without the dissolution of the monasteries, Shakespeare is perhaps unthinkable.
A twofold consequence of the dissolution of the monasteries is that it 1) began to put to rest the art of manuscript production, and 2) ended a particular tradition of spiritual writing. This tradition is bound up in the nature of producing manuscripts. Yet it is also explicitly tied to the medium of the monastery. Caedmon, England’s great mystical writers, the Venerable Bede, and the many unknown scribes who produced England’s illuminated manuscripts, all of them were “produced” by the monastery model. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he ended that tradition.
The vision of Nehemiah & Blake is to resurrect that tradition in the context of contemporary England. The vision is not to slavishly try reproduce that model, but rather to discover it, probe it, question it, understand it and seek to find an equitable way in which the conditions that produced this kind of writing in England then can be transposed to the present to reproduce a similar kind of writing today for Nehemiah & Blake to publish. But the vision is larger than that. It wishes also to replicate for communities in England today, the benefits that the monasteries and abbeys provided for their communities.
Nehemiah & Blake has only the smallest inclination of what these conditions might be and might have been, but future blog posts will go towards exploring this topic. Any suggestions, insights or comments on this would be greatly appreciated.
