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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
The abstraction of communication into symbols might be the unique thing that humans can claim is uniquely theirs. We can teach animals how to make our sounds and how to recognize what our sounds mean and to make those kinds of sounds back at us. We can teach animals how to make gestures that have specific language meanings and use those to communicate. We can do gestures for baby humans who haven't yet figured out sound communication, and we have developed entire languages of gestures that allow those who cannot hear or make language sounds to communicate equally as well. But a lot of human communication is done through abstractions, where glyphs, gestures, or other such representations of objects, sounds, states of mind, and the like are understood as both representations and the things themselves. As René Magritte captioned the drawing in The Treachery of Images, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Without that ability to abstract, however, and to translate those abstractions into our own sensory experiences and memories, human communication would be significantly less flexible and powerful.
The written word is one of the ways that humans have communicated with each other over both distance and time. Fragments of poetry that have managed to survive for thousands of years still beguile us today. A complaint about sub-par copper and a merchant who claimed otherwise remind the people of our time that some things are very common to the human experience, even if vast gulfs of linear time separate us. The very notion of "classic" anything is a testament to the idea that some things survive the passage of time and deliver a message to an audience far from when something was composed.
The codex form, where individual leaves were bound together in a cover, changed the way that we thought about words and written objects. Non-codex objects, like scrolls or pieces of wood bound together by string, cord, or other methods, are discrete objects, to be sure. They have narratives contained within them, with beginnings and ends, but the objects themselves can be arranged in whatever order someone would like. If you would like your scrolls of the Books of Moses to start with the Levitical commands, then you simply move the scroll to the first place and the new order is established. With the codex form, it is no longer easy to move the individual components of a work into whatever order is desired. A codex of the Books of Moses starts with a specific book, traverses through the others, and does not lend itself to easily being rearranged according to the desires of the reader. Sure, you can start at any point and read according to your own order, but the codex's organization of the material suggests you are doing something out of the ordinary if you start in the middle. Codex form produces a structure of its own that may not have been present in the original materials. The scrolls and the books get a "this came first, then this came next" organization to them that produces the Christian Bible, where a throughline develops, thanks to the codex and the arrangement of the books, where you have the idyll destroyed by knowledge, then the covenant that The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton made with Abraham and his line, the history of the people of that covenant, the ways the law was given, expounded upon, and interpreted, then the prophets who speak of a great time to come and a relief from their oppression, and then writings of those histories, other prophets, the actions of the judges, more interpretations of the law, hero stories, poems, proverbs, and more, with the codex form choosing to end the section about the covenant of Abraham's line with the strong implication that the accounts and the writings of one Jesus of Nazareth to come are the fulfillment of the prophecies and the covenant with Abraham's line. At which point you swap over to the Christian Foundational Writings, which are both a narrative about the person his followers believe is the prophesied one, the works that he did, and the teachings he left. And then the further actions of his disciples after Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension, before more material that is exposition and interpretation of what this new belief system looks like and what its most important tenets and covenants are, before the Writings themselves end with the Apocalypse of John, itself a work about what is to come and the eventual deliverance of the faithful from their oppressions into an eternal reward. Without the codex form guiding the reader through, the linear and temporal implications are mostly lost, because if you can arrange the subdivisions of the material however you like, then there's no solidity to the argument that all of these earlier, "Old" Testament materials are unequivocally pointing at the "New" Testament as the fulfillment of their laments and their prophecies. The materials excluded from the codex are so because they don't contribute to the narrative, or because the people who put the codex together decided they didn't fit the narrative. (Thus, you get Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and lost Gospels and the like.)
As we got better at producing codexes, we discovered that they are rather beneficial in their portability. And that you can make codexes of whatever size and thickness you like, so long as you have the leaves for it. Copying by hand still took significant amounts of time and effort, making codexes valuable, but once mass production was available, through printing presses and other mechanizations, codexes were in everyone's pockets. Which also meant that people could read the words themselves, as translated into their most familiar language, rather than having to rely on someone else to interpret the words for them. (Sort of. When we read works in translation, we are still relying on the translators to get across the meaning of the words in the original language, even if that means there has to be poetic license applied to the literal text to ensure the underlying meaning gets across.) With the ability to print and read for oneself, and the corresponding increases in literacy across the board, well, now everyone has an opinion. As prices of printing goes down, more and more people enter the world of having their opinions or stories printed and distributed to others. And with the advent of electronic publishing, websites, and social media, basically everyone has a platform to proclaim their opinions, tell their stories, or otherwise put themselves out in that abstracted communicative form, and have other people, who may or may not be in their locality, read and digest the things that a person puts out. There are so many more words and people in our conversations these days. Whether this is a good thing is an exercise mostly left to the reader.
There are still a couple of forms that follow the scroll idea for publishing. Magazines, newspapers, music albums, and hypertext. And some things that still follow the codex when they don't have to, at least in electronic form, like anthologies, short story collections, and the like.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I gave been part of the community of people who read from a very young age, and of reading books when I get the opportunity to do so. Memory doesn't go back all the way to the beginning, but I do know there was a set of Sweet Pickles books in the household and those got read aloud with me, and that I likely read them aloud as well. The practice in my childhood home involved a lot of reading aloud, and repetition of certain books down the line of siblings (I think all of us are very well-versed in Frank Asch's Turtle Tale) as we learned how to translate between graphs and phonemes and back again, until we had the knack of it and were let loose in the public library's collection, as well as accumulating a bookshelf's worth of material of our own. Or very nearly such - there were grownup books on the same shelves as the kids ones. Book fair sales usually meant adding a couple of paperbacks from the limited selection available.
Surprisingly enough, my parents did not attempt to regulate my choices of reading material, when that reading material was clearly fiction. I read an awful lot of stories involving wizards, magicians, swords, demons, evil, gods, and the like. And played computer games of the same sort, and went through the various gamebooks that were in vogue at the time. (I didn't get into tabletop role-playing games, but PC and console ones, since I didn't live places where my powers could easily get together and do such things, and Internet access was still not broadband for a large chunk of my childhood and adolescence.) It was at the point where I started doing research into the nonfiction aspects of neopaganism that my parents began to disapprove of my reading choices. (They're practicing Catholics, I don't blame them for concern, but i do blame them for how they went about it.) Through that, however, I learned the value of having backup methods, and that my librarians were not broadcasting to everyone what was being checked out from their spaces. And, although I didn't encounter the source quote until later, that networks, especially networks with librarians, tend to see censorship as damage and route around it. As plenty of places are discovering, you can ban a book from your physical space, but they doesn't actually remove access to it except for those people who don't have a workaround, or a friend with a workaround. (As for neopaganism, it got added to my knowledge store, and with time and aging, I think I understand many of the things I read before better now. It may not ever result in any kind of practice, but I am a perpetually curious outsider willing to see and get explanations for what gets made public.)
The desire to read through entire series also helped me get comfortable with the requests system and the interlibrary loan systems. Regular library trips were always part of the deal, and even more so in summer. This came from the privilege of having one parent staying at home throughout my childhood, a situation increasingly denied to many children. Voracious reading meant both ILL and expanding the sections of the library I was allowed to roam, such that I was plucking material from the adult audience sections well before becoming a chronological adult. At university, a lot of my reading shifted over to academic material and reading things on webpages, a situation that has not changed significantly once leaving university and becoming employed. I do still have time for print books, even thigh it's easier to squeeze graphic novels and manga into the gaps of time where I can take in a book. And, if it isn't obvious, I do a fair amount more writing in these years than I did when I was in schooling, so that also takes up time I could be reading. (As does all of the additional cruft, overhead, and requirements of being a functional adult with a job and a house and other such things. They being me joy and aggravation, but they provide benefits that are generally with their costs.)
People who saw my book habits and my reading would say they were unsurprised at my choice of working in libraries, but most of the reasoning behind that is unsound. I will get into that in a later entry in this series. For this one, the part of my work that is in recommending books and materials to others is about building that community of people who read, view, listen, and otherwise engage with the words and works of others. The part of me that provides books, songs, rhymes, and social time for the very small, does so with the idea and the hope that these kids and their grownups will start and continue in the community of those who read and enjoy books and narrative, even if the medium of that reading doesn't look like the codex that I grew up with. You'll often hear S.R. Ranganathan quoted by librarians, with a pair of his laws of library science, each a mirror of the other: every book its reader, every reader their book. All the things that are written are for an audience, even if the audience is one, maybe two. All the readers of the world have at least one thing that they will be profoundly moved by the reading of. Lucky readers have many books, lucky books have many readers, but one of the things that makes a community of readers go is the freedom to chose which book to try, and the freedom to reject the book you've selected and go get another. Or to change your reading and interpretation of the text so that you get something out of it, even if the author yells at you that you are "interpreting this text from the wrong perspective." The community of readers is always looking for one more of those stories, books, scrolls, pages, articles, that will invoke the desired feeling, the desired learning, the thing that is best for right now (and maybe for the future.) The community of readers wants to share the things that have affected them profoundly in the hope that you, too, will be affected, and through your shared affection, you can get to know each other and the text better.
I would like to do more reading, honestly. And all the other things that I want to be able to do, if only I weren't limited by the passage of time, and that I can't repeat time that's already happened.
The abstraction of communication into symbols might be the unique thing that humans can claim is uniquely theirs. We can teach animals how to make our sounds and how to recognize what our sounds mean and to make those kinds of sounds back at us. We can teach animals how to make gestures that have specific language meanings and use those to communicate. We can do gestures for baby humans who haven't yet figured out sound communication, and we have developed entire languages of gestures that allow those who cannot hear or make language sounds to communicate equally as well. But a lot of human communication is done through abstractions, where glyphs, gestures, or other such representations of objects, sounds, states of mind, and the like are understood as both representations and the things themselves. As René Magritte captioned the drawing in The Treachery of Images, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Without that ability to abstract, however, and to translate those abstractions into our own sensory experiences and memories, human communication would be significantly less flexible and powerful.
The written word is one of the ways that humans have communicated with each other over both distance and time. Fragments of poetry that have managed to survive for thousands of years still beguile us today. A complaint about sub-par copper and a merchant who claimed otherwise remind the people of our time that some things are very common to the human experience, even if vast gulfs of linear time separate us. The very notion of "classic" anything is a testament to the idea that some things survive the passage of time and deliver a message to an audience far from when something was composed.
The codex form, where individual leaves were bound together in a cover, changed the way that we thought about words and written objects. Non-codex objects, like scrolls or pieces of wood bound together by string, cord, or other methods, are discrete objects, to be sure. They have narratives contained within them, with beginnings and ends, but the objects themselves can be arranged in whatever order someone would like. If you would like your scrolls of the Books of Moses to start with the Levitical commands, then you simply move the scroll to the first place and the new order is established. With the codex form, it is no longer easy to move the individual components of a work into whatever order is desired. A codex of the Books of Moses starts with a specific book, traverses through the others, and does not lend itself to easily being rearranged according to the desires of the reader. Sure, you can start at any point and read according to your own order, but the codex's organization of the material suggests you are doing something out of the ordinary if you start in the middle. Codex form produces a structure of its own that may not have been present in the original materials. The scrolls and the books get a "this came first, then this came next" organization to them that produces the Christian Bible, where a throughline develops, thanks to the codex and the arrangement of the books, where you have the idyll destroyed by knowledge, then the covenant that The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton made with Abraham and his line, the history of the people of that covenant, the ways the law was given, expounded upon, and interpreted, then the prophets who speak of a great time to come and a relief from their oppression, and then writings of those histories, other prophets, the actions of the judges, more interpretations of the law, hero stories, poems, proverbs, and more, with the codex form choosing to end the section about the covenant of Abraham's line with the strong implication that the accounts and the writings of one Jesus of Nazareth to come are the fulfillment of the prophecies and the covenant with Abraham's line. At which point you swap over to the Christian Foundational Writings, which are both a narrative about the person his followers believe is the prophesied one, the works that he did, and the teachings he left. And then the further actions of his disciples after Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension, before more material that is exposition and interpretation of what this new belief system looks like and what its most important tenets and covenants are, before the Writings themselves end with the Apocalypse of John, itself a work about what is to come and the eventual deliverance of the faithful from their oppressions into an eternal reward. Without the codex form guiding the reader through, the linear and temporal implications are mostly lost, because if you can arrange the subdivisions of the material however you like, then there's no solidity to the argument that all of these earlier, "Old" Testament materials are unequivocally pointing at the "New" Testament as the fulfillment of their laments and their prophecies. The materials excluded from the codex are so because they don't contribute to the narrative, or because the people who put the codex together decided they didn't fit the narrative. (Thus, you get Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and lost Gospels and the like.)
As we got better at producing codexes, we discovered that they are rather beneficial in their portability. And that you can make codexes of whatever size and thickness you like, so long as you have the leaves for it. Copying by hand still took significant amounts of time and effort, making codexes valuable, but once mass production was available, through printing presses and other mechanizations, codexes were in everyone's pockets. Which also meant that people could read the words themselves, as translated into their most familiar language, rather than having to rely on someone else to interpret the words for them. (Sort of. When we read works in translation, we are still relying on the translators to get across the meaning of the words in the original language, even if that means there has to be poetic license applied to the literal text to ensure the underlying meaning gets across.) With the ability to print and read for oneself, and the corresponding increases in literacy across the board, well, now everyone has an opinion. As prices of printing goes down, more and more people enter the world of having their opinions or stories printed and distributed to others. And with the advent of electronic publishing, websites, and social media, basically everyone has a platform to proclaim their opinions, tell their stories, or otherwise put themselves out in that abstracted communicative form, and have other people, who may or may not be in their locality, read and digest the things that a person puts out. There are so many more words and people in our conversations these days. Whether this is a good thing is an exercise mostly left to the reader.
There are still a couple of forms that follow the scroll idea for publishing. Magazines, newspapers, music albums, and hypertext. And some things that still follow the codex when they don't have to, at least in electronic form, like anthologies, short story collections, and the like.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that I gave been part of the community of people who read from a very young age, and of reading books when I get the opportunity to do so. Memory doesn't go back all the way to the beginning, but I do know there was a set of Sweet Pickles books in the household and those got read aloud with me, and that I likely read them aloud as well. The practice in my childhood home involved a lot of reading aloud, and repetition of certain books down the line of siblings (I think all of us are very well-versed in Frank Asch's Turtle Tale) as we learned how to translate between graphs and phonemes and back again, until we had the knack of it and were let loose in the public library's collection, as well as accumulating a bookshelf's worth of material of our own. Or very nearly such - there were grownup books on the same shelves as the kids ones. Book fair sales usually meant adding a couple of paperbacks from the limited selection available.
Surprisingly enough, my parents did not attempt to regulate my choices of reading material, when that reading material was clearly fiction. I read an awful lot of stories involving wizards, magicians, swords, demons, evil, gods, and the like. And played computer games of the same sort, and went through the various gamebooks that were in vogue at the time. (I didn't get into tabletop role-playing games, but PC and console ones, since I didn't live places where my powers could easily get together and do such things, and Internet access was still not broadband for a large chunk of my childhood and adolescence.) It was at the point where I started doing research into the nonfiction aspects of neopaganism that my parents began to disapprove of my reading choices. (They're practicing Catholics, I don't blame them for concern, but i do blame them for how they went about it.) Through that, however, I learned the value of having backup methods, and that my librarians were not broadcasting to everyone what was being checked out from their spaces. And, although I didn't encounter the source quote until later, that networks, especially networks with librarians, tend to see censorship as damage and route around it. As plenty of places are discovering, you can ban a book from your physical space, but they doesn't actually remove access to it except for those people who don't have a workaround, or a friend with a workaround. (As for neopaganism, it got added to my knowledge store, and with time and aging, I think I understand many of the things I read before better now. It may not ever result in any kind of practice, but I am a perpetually curious outsider willing to see and get explanations for what gets made public.)
The desire to read through entire series also helped me get comfortable with the requests system and the interlibrary loan systems. Regular library trips were always part of the deal, and even more so in summer. This came from the privilege of having one parent staying at home throughout my childhood, a situation increasingly denied to many children. Voracious reading meant both ILL and expanding the sections of the library I was allowed to roam, such that I was plucking material from the adult audience sections well before becoming a chronological adult. At university, a lot of my reading shifted over to academic material and reading things on webpages, a situation that has not changed significantly once leaving university and becoming employed. I do still have time for print books, even thigh it's easier to squeeze graphic novels and manga into the gaps of time where I can take in a book. And, if it isn't obvious, I do a fair amount more writing in these years than I did when I was in schooling, so that also takes up time I could be reading. (As does all of the additional cruft, overhead, and requirements of being a functional adult with a job and a house and other such things. They being me joy and aggravation, but they provide benefits that are generally with their costs.)
People who saw my book habits and my reading would say they were unsurprised at my choice of working in libraries, but most of the reasoning behind that is unsound. I will get into that in a later entry in this series. For this one, the part of my work that is in recommending books and materials to others is about building that community of people who read, view, listen, and otherwise engage with the words and works of others. The part of me that provides books, songs, rhymes, and social time for the very small, does so with the idea and the hope that these kids and their grownups will start and continue in the community of those who read and enjoy books and narrative, even if the medium of that reading doesn't look like the codex that I grew up with. You'll often hear S.R. Ranganathan quoted by librarians, with a pair of his laws of library science, each a mirror of the other: every book its reader, every reader their book. All the things that are written are for an audience, even if the audience is one, maybe two. All the readers of the world have at least one thing that they will be profoundly moved by the reading of. Lucky readers have many books, lucky books have many readers, but one of the things that makes a community of readers go is the freedom to chose which book to try, and the freedom to reject the book you've selected and go get another. Or to change your reading and interpretation of the text so that you get something out of it, even if the author yells at you that you are "interpreting this text from the wrong perspective." The community of readers is always looking for one more of those stories, books, scrolls, pages, articles, that will invoke the desired feeling, the desired learning, the thing that is best for right now (and maybe for the future.) The community of readers wants to share the things that have affected them profoundly in the hope that you, too, will be affected, and through your shared affection, you can get to know each other and the text better.
I would like to do more reading, honestly. And all the other things that I want to be able to do, if only I weren't limited by the passage of time, and that I can't repeat time that's already happened.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-03 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-03 04:41 pm (UTC)