 Jacket image © Reaktion Books Ltd/ University of Chicago Press Never before in world history have so many people been engaged in the act of writing on a daily basis as we are now. And writing tools and surfaces are still evolving, from our screen-based writing, with speech-to-text, cut-and-paste, auto-correct, and emoticon functions as well as the introduction of smart pens, e-markers, and digital notebooks, and instantaneously AI-generated and ChatGPT "writing." Writing reaches beyond "writing." I've come across countless references to writer-like gestures within mid-20th century American and European abstract painting -- terms like "ideograms" "mark-making," "calligraphic strokes," "cursives," "pictographic," "asemic writing." I've been overdue learning about writing’s origins and evolution, as well as its often overlooked plasticity as a very human, embodied medium. For an accessible starter, I found A History of Writing (Reaktion Books 2001) by Steven Roger Fischer (now in its third edition). Per his publisher's page, Fischer is the "former director of the Institute of Polynesian Languages and Literatures in Auckland, New Zealand." Ignorant about linguistics and anthropology, I'm relieved that Fischer's account is free of specialized jargon. His prose is consistently direct and clear even when teasing out the many complicated nuances . I’m looking forward to getting to the book’s many other chapters (on “Speaking Systems,” on European alphabets, on the East Asian ‘Regenesis,” “The Parchment Keyboard” and "Scripting the Future"). For now, this post is a quick and likely reductive take on ancient cultural developments and leaps in and across early writing systems covered by Fischer, such as the pivotal introduction of the “rebus principle.” According to The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics “the rebus principle” is the process “by which, in some systems of writing, symbols representing one or more words are combined to represent another word which is similar in sound. Suppose that English eye [ʌɪ] were represented by a single character <eye>, and deer [dɪə] by a single character <deer>; then, by the rebus principle, idea [ʌɪdɪə] might be represented by the combination <eye><deer>.” That said, Fischer argues that writing did not “evolve” in any direct or even linear manner. He notes that many writing practices inexplicably vanished after centuries of cultural use. Often writing practices from disparate regions overlapped and adopted or absorbed elements from one to the other. Crucially, he distinguishes pictorial forms of "proto-writing" from ancient "complete writing" systems which would, many centuries later, lead to the global alphabets we have today. According to Fischer’s definition, a "complete writing" must "have as its purpose communication [...] must consist of artificial graphic marks on a durable or electronic surface [... ] [and] must use marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech (the systematic arrangement of significant vocal sounds) or electronic programming in such a way that communication is achieved" (12). After covering proto-writing forms – like knot records, notches, pictography, tallies, mnemonics, signal messages, and tokens, Fischer dives into "The Talking Art" namely, the "complete writing" systems developed in Egyptian and Sumerian regions. Below are some photographs I've collated to illustrate some of the ancient writings examined early on in The History of Writing. [All images are captioned and credited to original sources.]  Pebble from the Grotte du Mas d'Azil - c. 10,000-8000 BC © Wikimedia / Didier Descouens "some regard the coloured pebbles of southern France's Azilian culture [...] to be the world's first pictographic writing" but Fischer believes they are probably "indexical symbols." .  Tartaria clay tablets c. 5300-4300 BC, or possibly later c. 2700 BC [Central Balkans] , writing that is a 'graphic symbol inventory' .  "A five-day ration list. Each line of proto-cuneiform text mentions rations for one day. The sign for 'day' and the numbers 1-5 are easily identifiable." - via Wikipedia/ British Museum. Per Fischer, it's probably from Jemdet-Nasr, Iraq, circa 3000, BC. Housed in The British Museum.  Sumerian pictographic limestone tablet from Kish, an ancient Mesopotamian city-state [modern Iran], Late Utrak period c 3500 BC. – via Ashmolean Museum, England.  per Fischer: "The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) [currently housed in The British Museum] memorializes Ptolemy V in three different scripts: (top) Egyptian hieroglyphs, (center) Egyptian demotic; (bottom) Greece."  Dunloe Ogham Stones in Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, by Robert Lindsell, 2015, Wikipedia Commons Sculpted diction. Mineralized utterances. Stony phonetics. Carved vowels. Enigmatic mark-making. Why did I not know this form of ancient Irish writing called ogham? In Old Irish ogham was spelt 'ogam' and is pronounced oh-um or oɣəm. "Ogam" might derive from the Irish "og-uaim," meaning “point-seam.” Ogham inscriptions begin with vertical marks made on a tall rectilinear stone starting at its outer edge [in Irish droim or faobhar] forming the “stemline” from which horizonal letters were then added above or below to complete the unfolding letter. Ogham developed in Celtic Ireland and Britain in either the 1st or the 4th century AD [akin to but not related to Scandinavian runes; perhaps first written on perishable materials like wood], Some 400 stones containing ogham are still to be found in contemporary Ireland, in County Kerry, Cork and Waterford, and in Wales [in Pembrokeshire where bilingual Irish-Latin ogham stone writings are extant], Scotland, Isle of Man, Orkney and the Devon and Cornwall border in southwest England. One ogham stone was just discovered last year in a garden in Coventry, England. Irish ogham is related to Latin writing: “[Ogham is] [t]he earliest form of writing in Irish in which the Latin alphabet is adapted to twenty ‘letters’ [15 consonants and 5 vowels) made of straight lines and notches carved on the edge of a piece of stone or wood. Letters are divided into four categories of five sounds.” A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (Oxford University Press, 1998).  ogham morphology  This pagan genealogy for ogham seems apt; the writing was a bardic craft. The preeminent ogham scholar Damian McManus notes that the preparation of the Irish poet or file required learning one hundred and fifty varieties of ogham – fifty in each of the first three years of study. Ogham survived into the manuscript era in the 9th century, as evidence in this riveting sample from the manuscripts In Lebor Ogaim (The Ogam Tract) -- a scriptural tour de force. And a pictographic masterpiece, too.  Obviously these Irish poet-scribes were visual artists, too, ogham represents an ancient cultural overlap between the arts of writing and picture-making – (and sculpture!).
Further interest: click here for perusing a joint Ireland-UK digital research and archival web project on ogham based in Glasgow, and this 3-D ogham project here and those interested in a digital library for accessing works of Irish scribes ought to drop by here: from your screen you can peruse in hi-res 450 digitized Irish manuscripts located all over the world. [all images commons/public domain]  Willem de Kooning "The Young Poet," lithograph, 1988 [series from limited edition of Frank O'Hara's poetry] photo from collection of Tim Keane, 2017 Welcome. This blog is devoted to sharing random sightings, findings, notes and photos about crosscurrents in poetry and visual art, as well as posts about intersections among the arts as spied in modern & contemporary urban culture. GLIMPSE takes its title in part from comments made in a 1960 interview with the Dutch-American painter Willem de Kooning. Asked about his approach to making art, he compared his work to that of a poet, then to a novelist, adding that he "like[s] the word in painting" and that in his art "content [..] is a glimpse of something, an encounter, a flash." The 20th century painter echoes similar ideas expressed in the 19th century by French poet Charles Baudelaire who believed that the modern artist and modern writer are most interested in exploring the "ephemeral, fugitive, the contingent." Baudelaire, like De Kooning, wanted to find "eternity in the ephemeral." Hope this space leads to enthusiastic and thought-provoking engagement on the eternal and the ephemeral and much that falls in between.  photo of Charles Baudelaire c early 1860s, photographer unknown |
Tim KeaneWriter, visual art maker, wanderer. Archives
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