Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for Uncategorized
data to nourish our souls
Stephen Bayley ends a recent article on DDR design with the following comment:
“The greatest legacy of the Cold War? [...] [I]t’s the internet, a system designed to secure free movement of the US command structure’s data in the event of a Soviet missile attack.” (italics mine).
That is the nature of the internet: to allow for the accumulation and free movement of data in order to facilitate another end altogether. In an article for Harper’s Magazine, August 1995 entitled “What are we doing on-line?”, when the internet was commercially in its infancy, Sven Birkerts critically noted that
“[t]he supreme capability that this particular chip-driven silicon technology has is to transfer binary units of information. And therefore, as it takes over the world, it privileges those units of information. When everyone is wired and humming, most of what will be going through those wires is that sort of information. If it were soul-data, that might be a different thing, but soul-data doesn’t travel through the wires.”
This view, however, is one that tends to see soul intrinsic to content, when it is not. Soul belongs to human beings. Once upon a time in western thought, we adhered to the belief that the word was imbued with being. What was forgotten was that the Word became flesh, and that the Word is a person, and not a book. Data is information, and, where once the printing press freed up the movement of that information for people to make up their own minds about God, now the internet is doing it. What is different is the medium in which this information is carried.
The book as a self-contained unit puts borders around the information it carries. To make use of that information, one must invest much time in mining a book for what profit it can produce. The physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual bond that is created between the reader and the book leads to misjudgement that somehow this book carries soul-data, when in fact it has merely facilitated the nourishment of the soul.
The internet on the other hand, places no such borders on its information, and where such borders might be found to exist, seeks to tear them down through integration and mash-ups so that disparate strands of data can come together in increasingly complex formulations of data that reveal seams of knowledge as yet untapped.
Konica Minolta have been working on a project to unravel the mysteries of the statue of Venus de Milo. They write,
“Recreating the Venus de Milo on our computers allowed us to make a very detailed examination of all aspects of the sculpture. We were able to see things invisible to the naked eye, and to visualize possible shapes and poses of the original statue. We were making a fresh discovery: a previously unknown beauty.” (italics mine)
While books will remain a medium of their own, and continue to hold to themselves the mystique they have so generously earned, perhaps it is time for us to throw our many many books, the making of which there is no ending, into the particle generator that is post-modernity and send them spinning round until they smash into each other. When they do, let us then be there to collect the information freed from these collisions and allow our understanding of this ever deepening mystery of creation to be drawn on into new spheres of data for the nourishment of our souls.
A series of small insurrections, part III
Publishing an increasing amount of books annually is a methodical madness for the publishing industry. Because determining what a readership might be remains an alchemical mystery, the publishing industry has settled on a model somewhat akin to a shotgun: In one year, publish as many books as you can in the hope that one or two of them will hit the bird of phenomenal readership. This model is what keeps the publishing world afloat. But it is clearly unsustainable for 90% of professional writers.
Thus this third tangential essay on Robert McCrum’s “thriller in ten chapters” has to do with the number of books being published – pushing 200,000 in the UK in 2007 – and “that age-old struggle” of books and writers “to achieve a readership.” The obvious paradox is, the more books published, the less the chance each one has of achieving an economically significant readership (statistically, less than 500, according to last week’s Thursday Soapbox on Vulpes Libris by Marygm). What this translates into is that the typical professional writer earns £4,000 a year, 33% below the national wage (according to an ALCS – The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society).
Which begs the question, should we not reconsider the concept of the “professional writer”? The “professional writer” is not a phenomenon of late capitalism. It is a phenomenon, at least in Europe, of the Reformation, and in England, the Reformation and Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536-40. Before this time, there was no “professional writing class” but monks in abbey scriptoriums, poets in royal courts and scholars at the Oxbridge universities. The turning out of monks, the religious upheaval of the royal courts and the doctrinal splits in scholastic philosophy gave birth to the professional writer as monks, poets and scholars sought their survival. It was perhaps as brutal a world, probably more so, for the professional writer as it is today.
Of the writing monk, the poet and the scholar, Nehemiah & Blake is most provoked by the monk. If modern dismissal of medieval church institutions as corrupt, greedy and hypocritical is temporarily laid aside, the abbeys and monasteries can be seen for what they were in Medieval England – deeply embedded symbiotic patrons of the communities in which they existed. It needs also to be remembered that among the populace of England, the dissolution of the monasteries was very unpopular, because it put the abbey lands into the hands of private landowners who were perhaps corrupter, greedier and more hypocritical towards the people.
The writing monk or nun would have lived within his/her abbey, a community upon which the monk or nun could rely on in support of their primary vocation. The abbey in turn would have been living within a rural community, supporting it in terms of providing farm land at reasonable rent, the community supporting the abbey from the sale of its produce. As a model, it wasn’t perfect. Nothing is in this world. The key here is seeing the writer being placed firmly within the economy of these interlocking communities.
In the first instance then, the writer finds abundant support to live, something clearly lacking in the current professional model. In the second instance, the writer is producing what his or her immediate community – the abbey – requires and wants to read. A small but secure and sustainable readership is gained. In the third instance, a potentially vast readership is still available through a network of “abbeys”.
In the case of the third instance, the difference between the abbey model and today’s publishing model is that a vast readership is not the first line of attack. Many might argue that blogs fulfil the second instance of the abbey model and lead to the third. Nehemiah & Blake would agree with that. However, 90% of bloggers are not going to see economic abundance flow from their efforts. It is in achieving the first instance that Nehemiah & Blake sees the greatest challenge and opportunity for writers who believe that writing is a primary vocation: To take the abbey model and rebuild it into the fabric of contemporary society.
This would mean for writers to seek out living in community with non-writers and for each to support the other in creating a sustainable economy of living. Further, this would mean for that “abbey” community to work in such away that it can offer something symbiotic that the wider community around it can use towards its own needs. If this can be achieved, then the need for a writer to sell 100,000 books in order to survive is no longer necessary. Five hundred to a sustainable and secure readership would suffice. There will always be writers that break beyond the boundaries of immediate community. This has been happening since the days of the Venerable Bede. But we would not have Bede were it not for the abbey at Jarrow and the community that lived around it. The call then is for a change in mindset among writers.
Towards defining an “archetext”
Archetext is a neologism that mashes the prefix for the word “archetype” together with “text”. Yet it also phonetically suggests a mashing of “text” with the prefixes for the words “architect” and “archaeologist”: archetext is also architext and archaetext. An archetext is thus a text in which archetypal, canonical (architectural in the sense that canonical texts construct a literature) and ancient sacral texts are mashed together.
Moreover, the word “archetext”, when spoken sounds almost indistinguishable from architects. Thus, an archetext, is both a text and a group of chief authors building a text. In having an archetypal foundation, a canonical architecture and an ancient history as its structure, an archetext, both as text and group of texts, opens itself to contain fresh prophetic visions not originally envisioned in the building texts.
Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is a prototype of what an archetext might be. It mashes pagan ritual and myth together with Christian salvation and apocalypse, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland with Dante’s Purgatory, Biblical scriptures Jude and Revelation with the novel genre. The characters are plotted to the stringencies of the building texts. The reader is left in a world that is a secularised, small town environment in 1998 that is simultaneously a pagan underworld, a Catholic purgatory, a modernist poem, the Church and the outworking of the biblical Apocalypse. The characters must play the roles of those partaking in a vegetation ritual and the apocalypse. As they follow these texts, they derive their own interpretations that leave them exposed to a prophetic future that they, nor the reader, can fully comprehend, but that nevertheless demands the inquiry, “What is being told here?”
A series of small insurrections, part I
In his final Observer piece, Robert McCrum makes the point that what has happened to publishing in the last ten years has been “the biggest revolution since William Caxton set up his printing shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.”
McCrum notes this revolution has come about (as revolutions do) through a “series of small but significant insurrections” in publishing that have placed “the language and habits of the market at the heart of every literary transaction.” It also begins, he notes, to coincide with the rise of New Labour.
“Heaven or hell? It’s too soon to say,” McCrum concludes. Perhaps there is a sense of a Yeatsian beast having been born some 10 years ago, not just in publishing, but more broadly with how the world has changed. Richard Wasserfall has forbodingly captured this sense of a new spirit in Apocalypse of Jude, set interestingly in 1998. The spirit that is violently and bloodily conceived into flesh in this fiction, were it real (and perhaps it is), would now be approaching 10 years of age – a long way from maturity, but still inexorably growing towards it.
But what could be a kind of writer’s hell – where all the opportunities for trading books means that the book becomes “more marginal, even vulnerable” – could become a form of heaven. If the publishing changes and technology of the past decade have forced “a massive interior renovation in the house of books” to accommodate the beast, perhaps it has also paradoxically paved the way for forms of publishing resistances. The possibility of this type of resistance is the path that Nehemiah and Blake seeks out, and will be explored in a follow-up post.
Marking the start of the trail
Nehemiah and Blake’s birth has coincided with Robert McCrum’s stepping down after ten years as The Observer’s literary editor. This is a sad event, for he has been a fine commentator on the changing world of books and publishing. His parting comments – a review of the past decade – serves opportunisitically as a perspective-creating trailmarking for Nehemiah and Blake.
