Genese Grill
In a famous still-popular Jewish dreambook [from around 1513], we find a section devoted to the "higher beings" such as "the planet and stars, thunder, and books."
–Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk ReligionAlmandal is an Arabic word for the wax tablet altar on which the magician engraves divine names and the seals of Solomon with a silver stylus. It was also the title of a "guide to the ritual invocation of angels," Almandal Grimoire.
–Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
When my nephew was a young boy, he got it into his head that I was a witch, and I have never denied it. He earnestly implored me to teach him magic, by which he particularly meant flying and telekinesis. Magic, to him, was necessarily bound up in visible and palpable changes in the physical world. He would not be satisfied unless he could travel to other worlds or make heavy furniture hurtle across the room. I wrote him a letter, illuminated with colored inks and closed with a wax seal, gently explaining that real magicians could not be bothered with merely physical tricks such as lifting our lumbering human bodies or bulky old chairs in the air.
Feeling somewhat like a charlatan employing special pleading, I tried to convince him that real magic dealt with numinous ethereal substances, not to be tested by our physical senses or by crude mechanical devices. And that we could travel in time and space, but it was more expedient and much more graceful to leave our bodies behind when we did so. Simultaneously, I maintained that real magic does alter the physical world, but not usually immediately, and not in the way he expected. Magic works on the physical world because intentional wishing and imagining motivate us to live differently and to believe in our fantasies enough to actuate them, because living and performing ritual acts like scattering rose blossoms under the bicycle wheels of beloved strangers and making love often produce quite remarkable transformations in our real physical circumstances. And because sending a handwritten letter through space really is a wondrous way to make ideas real.
He may have been too young at that time to understand existentialism, but I think he did grasp what I was trying to say, and I hope I escaped the shame of disappointing a small boy who believed I might teach him to fly. Now, years later, he is an artist and musician whose ideas and dreams become manifest in sounds, words, and actions; I hope he still thinks I am a witch, not least of all because I write books and paint pictures (anagoges, my friend Kathryn Barush calls them) which aim to levitate people, if not objects, from the merely prosaic into some other realm of consciousness, or to inspire us all to see the magic shining in matter. Although I may have seemed to denigrate matter in the letter I wrote to my nephew long ago, claiming that real magic does not deal in bodies, the opposite is just as true, for without a body there can be no imagination. A body, more than any other physical object except maybe a book, is a powerful portal to the spirit. Magic books, called grimoires, were from their inception fundamentally physical objects believed to have the power to change physical circumstances.
What, then, is the significance of disembodying books? And what dire consequences may be lurking behind the commonly optimistic celebration of "transcendent" textuality? The age of the disembodied book is upon us, and I fear that a book bereft of its bindings is a dire symbol of the disintegration of the powerful and contested bond between ideas and reality, words and action, imagination and manifestation. The proper confluence of the allegedly dualistic realms of spirit and matter has been contested over the course of thousands of years of theological and philosophical debate. A book, traditionally a product of the marriage of matter and spirit, ideas and formal materiality, is a vivid symbol through which to assess our current relationship to these polarities within the context of historical perspectives. My instinct rages against the idea of disembodying any book, and my research and philosophical reflection have explained why: when we wrest a book from its bindings, we are undermining a magical connection between thought and life, dreams and flesh. We are undermining the human capacity to change physical reality by virtue of imagination.
Books have often been created and studied for the express purpose of effecting magical transformation, either literally or metaphorically, and this impulse on the part of book makers and book readers is a perfect object lesson in the confluence of spirit and matter. As books begin to lose their physical objecthood, we must ask whether the spiritual part that remains still holds on to its potency. Changes have occurred in the form and the process of making books over millennia, dramatically exemplified by the invention of the printing press, but today we are faced with an incalculably more extreme transformation, one that wrests the soul of a book from its physical body while telling us we have everything to gain and nothing to lose in the process. As Roger Chartier, one of the leading scholars in the field of book science, explains in Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, our current revolution "modifies not only the technology for reproduction of the text, but even the materiality of the object that communicates the text to readers". The electronic text revolutionizes the "text's status," he continues, because "for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location." In contrast to the former arrangement of text, margins, and pages, allowing for "the immediate apprehension of the whole work," this new form substitutes "the free composition of infinitely manipulable fragments . . . textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders."
Anyone who thinks we will be able, in the future, to have both real and virtual books in any significantly equal proportion is ignoring the history of new media supplanting old, from orality to writing, from hand-illuminated to letterpress printing, from letterpress to offset, and beyond. Braids and knots are thought to hold spells and wishes and potencies. If spirit and matter were strands of silk twisted around each other, holding magical powers in the crux of their twining, whereto would these powers disperse were they unbound? What is a book without its binding?
There have always been those who would deny the book its materiality and champion the spiritual ideas within its pages at the expense of its physical bindings, weight, typography, end papers, margins, and ornament. Such people insist that a book is best when it makes us forget the world around us—when, absorbed in its pages, we forget we are reading, forget we are sitting in a room, forget what city or country we are in, forget the season, the century, and even gravity itself. And they do have a point, for to be transported into the freezing Arctic on a sweltering August day, or to a sultry island while shivering in one's unheated garret, or to be temporarily rapt by the sufferings of others instead of one's own, or to be in the company of charming and erudite (albeit cold and dead) thinkers and poets rather than among one's own dull and vulgar fellows is no small magic. Abstract ideas alone have warmed me with eternal-seeming fires on nights when I was forced to wear fingerless gloves to bed, daring only to let my hands out from under the covers to turn a page. And on many occasions, I have found closer companions between the pages of a novel than in the waking world.
Leah Price, in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, calls people who "conflate the practice of disinterested, linear sustained attention with the object that is the printed book" "nostalgists," noting that "secular novelists such as Dickens, Eliot, Brönte, and Trollope assumed that absorption in the text required forgetting its medium." She suggests, therefore, that the best reading is "platform independent . . . binding blind and edition deaf," a claim I find disturbing on at least two counts. First, if we were to accept fully that disinterested reading is the highest form, we could certainly argue that a bound book allows for absorption and forgetting—forgetting even the volume one holds in one's hand—where an electronic medium, with its infinite possibilities for distraction and digression, does not. Second, this disinterestedness—like any attempts to radically separate aesthetic experience from our lives—is itself somewhat suspect. Paradoxically, I am one of the first to celebrate the paramount importance of "art for art's sake" and its incomparable opportunity for free play of the mind in non-conscripted, open-ended experimentation and pleasure, but such an experience—if it is to have meaning in our real lives—cannot be fully separated from the sensuous. Is forgetting or ignoring the material world really the point of reading?
Imagination functions freely. Ideas cannot be burned or destroyed by even the wildest of bonfires, nor can they be blotted out by the most insidious inquisitions or boards of censorship. But the idea of championing the spirit over materiality is itself one of those eternal ideas—and, for all its beautiful liberation, it also has been associated throughout time with some less-than beautiful concepts and consequences. Consider Hans Christian Anderson's little match girl, lighting match after match to keep warm on Christmas night while seeing visions of turkey supper, Jesus, and warm fires—and in the end blissfully going up to heaven to meet her dear grandmother. Is the girl not freezing to death in an alley with only the consolation of Christianity to warm and feed her? Is this something to celebrate, or is it a suspicious morality tale designed to give consolation to those who would in truth do better to change their material circumstances, by self-actualization or by revolution, as the case may be? We can rejoice to imagine her physical suffering possibly being transcended by spiritual succor, but we might also deem a moral fable such as this—dependent as it remains upon physical eyes, physical comfort, and the physical book it is preserved in—a sort of pious fraud.
Here it is meet to ask whether the relationship between spirit and matter may be facilely reduced to an equation where physical equals utilitarian scaffold and spiritual equals all that we really value. When I say utilitarian, I am referring to a general favoring of utility over other human values, not directly to Jeremy Bentham's idea; but his "greatest good for the greatest number" does immediately raise the question of what sorts of things are considered to be good for human beings. His is a valuation that raises utility, convenience, and reduced economic expense over other forms of "good."
And this is where we see how complicated the answer has to be: although I agree with Thoreau that not only the body bleeds, and I question Brecht's "erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" (first comes feeding, then comes morality), it is certainly true that without a body one cannot harbor moral thoughts nor bleed either spiritually or physically. Why, then, is physicality so often relegated to the realm of base use when it encompasses and allows so much more? Moreover, the mass-produced electronic texts that are replacing books are—and here the ruse is exposed—still read on something physical, albeit something we hypocritically pretend is transcendent. We are simply trading one type of physicality for another—a physicality lacking in spirit, beauty, or human touch replacing one that has for centuries been a symbol and carrier of the most sacred devotion of human artistry and love. Science may well avail itself of new technologies, and insofar as scholarship is a science, we may use digitized texts to great benefit; but even here we run the risk of losing touch with the magic that drew us to books and images in the first place. We must continually refresh our senses at the stream of the real, and we must remember the great scholars of the past who conducted encyclopedic and profound feats of research without any of the technologies we have come to see as necessary today.
The proponents of new forms of reading often appeal to an ideal of greater accessibility and wider reach—advancing a probably quixotic hope that if texts were more readily available than they currently are, more people would read and more would become informed, active citizens. There are public libraries throughout America, and even though they are underfunded and underappreciated, they are still used by many. Sadly, the great majority of these visitors may be people purchasing on free computers things they don't need rather than borrowing free books filled with immaterial ideas. I fear that the really desperate state of literacy in our modern democratic society today has had something to do with the same forces that were up in arms at the birth of print—forces which had then and have now an interest in repressing the belief that the ideas inhering in the material object of a book have the power to alter and transform the material and spiritual reality of those who read, share, write, and otherwise interact with works held in hand. Ideas can change reality, but only if we believe that they do; most people, I am afraid, were you to ask them, would say their ideas, thoughts, words, and actions have no effect whatsoever on the physical world around them. What then is the existential significance of disembodying a book? Is this gradual process of dematerialization not similar in intent and ideology to some other attempts over the history of civilization to deny spirit the ballast of its physicality?
In the beginning, all books were grimoires, unapologetically physical objects, consciously created from carefully prepared and selected materials with the express intention of altering and affecting physical reality. For a long time, since many people who owned books could not read them, the physical nature of the books was more important than their linear or literal content. Magic books often contained different languages and "gibberish" mixtures of Hebrew, Chaldean, and hieroglyphics with spirit names, circles, stars, symbols, numeric equations, and magic squares.
Enoch is said to have invented books in the age before the Great Flood; the "Books of Enoch" filled with astronomical, astrological, and angelic lore, were, according to Owen Davies, circulating at the time of Jesus. The legend tells that Enoch's grandson Noah was in possession of astrological tracts like Enoch's, and through these books he communicated with the Angel Raziel. Raziel's transmitted knowledge was "then written on a sapphire that Noah kept in a golden chest that he brought with him in the ark." Inherited by one or both of Noah's sons, Ham and Shem, these books "preserved the arts of magic and idolatry." In the Mesopotamian region, Davies also tells us, cuneiform tablets of clay with magic rituals and incantations have been found dating from the 5th and 4th centuries. Spirit is literally embodied when desires, wishes, and sacred words are inscribed upon clods of clay with the intention of altering the physical world.
The way a book was made from the early Middle Ages and into the Renaissance affirmed the broader essential marriage of matter and spirit. Some thought it a good idea to sew the bindings of a book from something called "Virgin parchment," made from an immature animal, or even "Unborn parchment," made from the amniotic sac of aborted animal fetuses, "to ensure the purity of grimoire or charm." Papyrus was made from the pith of the wetland plants of the Nile Delta. Ink was consecrated by a priest or mixed with particular ingredients such as myrrh, "and blood was sometimes intermingled, as in a dream spell that required the blood of a baboon, the sacred animal of Thoth-Hermes. . . ."
The origin of the book as grimoire has something essential to do with the inversion by which a book today is so often considered a purely spiritual entity whose objecthood is seen as secondary at best, and something to be denied or obviated at worst. Priests and other religious authorities practiced ritual activities—with and without books—involving mixing, manipulating, symbolically arranging, and transforming matter. These activities intended to ensure physical comfort and safety, earthly gain and bounty, even the physical discomfort and death of enemies. When religious practitioners implored God to hear their pleas and grant a salvation here on earth from the pains and terrors of matter, it was called religion and sanctioned as something holy. When laypeople (peasants, warlocks and witches, healers, mystics, alchemists, and free thinkers) attempted to affect reality by any means other than those strictly prescribed by priests, such actions were called magic and were condemned as devilish and were often, as we know, punishable by death. A particular taboo obtained for any unsupervised action that seemed to combine spiritual with physical things: to worship an object, an image, or even a book in place of a God was called idolatry; to attempt to gain a physical boon was seen as a vulgar use of prayer which, at least in principle, ought rather to have been directed at some less tangible good (such as spiritual peace or humility). Further, to supplicate the gods to provide safety in disasters, to kill one's enemies, to deliver desired bodies into one's bed, or for earthly riches was tantamount to an attempt to usurp the power of God and, by association, the power of God's intercessors.
Magic books often instructed people to carry out ritual actions, which were symbolic, and, as such, themselves forms of image making, or an imitative-metaphor magic, wherein one physical thing or word or image stands for, represents, or relates to another. This mixing of physical and spiritual, while frowned upon for lay practice, runs through formal religious practices. One particularly flagrant instance is the Eucharist, wherein the wafer and the wine are, depending on differing doctrine, either really the body and blood of Christ or merely symbols. Jesus is God made flesh and the world is God's book; Nature is imbued with divine essence. Curiously, a prayer that one's soul might attain heaven was at least in some minds a prayer for physical peace, as the terrors of hell were conceived of as physical and the soul was thought by many to be accompanied in heaven by its own body in its most perfected state—before the onset of old age, before scars, before illness.
Calling the names of the angels inscribed in magical books and asking them for material boons is not as taboo in Judaism as it is in Christianity, yet there seems always to have been some wariness in the Judeo-Christian heritage about using physical objects as mediums of intercession between people and angels or gods in the interest of physical gain. It is probably also no accident that the original sin is eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and that, since the fall, books have most often been made of trees. (What will it mean if they come to be most often made of something else?!) The Genesis story signals an early warning in the long, complex, and passionate history of conflict around the search for knowledge that is now embodied in books. And indeed, the intense history of book burning and confiscation of books throughout the old world is evidence enough that the book once was thought to be a very powerful and dangerous object. Davies tells us that the early Church burnt Papyrii-magic books, seeing them as threatening the clergy's mission to convert the pagans. Those found with such books were often condemned, imprisoned, burned. . . .
Today, except by those fierce contingents who still try to ban them, books are generally believed to be more or less harmless and negligible, hardly capable of inciting or inspiring someone to interact in a revolutionary way with the physical world. They are generally thought to have as much power as magic is now admitted to have. Instead of seeking them out, burning them, or punishing those who read and possess them, our society has learned over centuries that when things, ideas, and people are martyred they gain more (not less) power, so we have discovered a more subtle method: ignoring, belittling, and trivializing powerful magical forces and diverting attention from them toward things that really are trivial, belittling, and negligible. In both cases, we can see a process whereby a sense of individual agency is undermined by a power intent on conformity and sleepy obedience, a process which marginalizes books and their potential to provide individuals with a means to interact and participate in the creation of their own physical and spiritual (political, social, aesthetic) environment.
Today, in Western culture at least, there seems to be no secret society of power-mongers comparable to the medieval or Renaissance Church or the censors of ensuing centuries who have a vested interest in undermining the possibility that the regular folk might harness the occult forces of books and knowledge. Still, there is an insidious devolution occurring which, by virtue of its seeming harmlessness, may already have succeeded in significantly weakening the energy and reach of the book in our culture. The idea that spirit cannot help but change reality is indeed terrifying for some people: those interested in maintaining a status quo and a fatalistic sense that there are no alternatives to remaining stuck would, of course, have an interest in suppressing the vital relationship between the book's body, the ideas encased within it, and the world outside. By disingenuously pretending that a book is somehow separate from the physical world, the culture industry has suggested that a book and the ideas in it have no effect on reality or on our lives beyond mere fantasy, frivolity, or escape. Ignoring books may be much worse than making them the martyred objects of witch hunts and book burnings. Books are left rotting in damp basements or by the side of the road, and barely a soul has "room" for them in today's crowded life. Today, that small retroactive faction which still works to ban books and censor ideas seem to be the only people who still give books their due. On the other extreme, there are some thinkers on the radical left who choose to vilify book culture as a tool of oppression imposed upon an underclass by an overclass. This is a damaging misrepresentation of the powerful radical force that books have been in battles for individual autonomy and freedom.
Consider our neglect of reading in comparison with the Lesewut (rage for reading) of Goethe's time. Roger Chartier writes that this "rage for reading" was considered to be "a danger to the political order . . . as a narcotic . . . or as a disordering of the imagination and the senses," and "There is no doubt that it played an essential role in the critical distancing that alienated subjects from their monarchs and Christians from their church throughout Europe and especially in France." Printing was described as a black art in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, and books as "silent heretics," and many people thought that the devil of reformation was behind printing. Indeed, as Davies stresses, the success of the Reformation depended on printing, with Luther as the most published author of the era. Rowland Philips, an English Catholic clergyman, said, "We must root out printing or printing will root out us". Itinerant travelers and foreigners carried "viral texts." A man named Robert Barker was put on trial in 1466 England for having "a book, and a roll of the black art containing characters, circles, exorcisms, and conjurations; a hexagonal sheet with strange figures; six metal plates with diverse characters, and a golden wand". Typically, these magical items were used for physical gain, to conjure a spirit to direct the possessor to gold and silver; Barker was "sentenced to public penance, walking around the market places of Ely and Cambridge in bare feet and carrying his books and magic paraphernalia, which were subsequently burned in the Cambridge market place". The Pope gave a license to the University of Cologne in 1475 to censor books, printing, and publishers. Lists of prohibited books were on the rise thereafter, to limit "the influence of non-Christian religions". The Spanish Inquisition has a reputation as the "most ruthless persecutor and censor of books," and "Some early historians have depicted it as being so influential that it retarded Spanish intellectual life until the 19th century". But, Davies argues, it was not as successful as historians maintain. Books survived: Jewish texts were hidden in wells and buried in gardens by "conversos" who secretly kept practicing in Spain; Jewish texts were smuggled in from Italy and the Netherlands; and the role of colporteurs or peddlers was crucial to the spread of grimoires because "In their packs they carried knowledge from other places, other worlds".
Illiterate people also owned grimoires. Davies writes, "the mere possession of non-diabolical grimoires was thought by some to have a protective function". Eamon Duffey, in The Stripping of the Altars, explains that wildly popular reformation primers were often conceived as "channels of secret power independent of the texts they accompanied. The fifteenth century had seen the circulation of devotional woodcuts which the faithful were encouraged to meditate on, to kneel before, to kiss".
Centuries later, colonialist missionaries tried in vain to repress bibliolatry, and to direct the natives' attention to the spirit of the Bible rather than its physical bulk. In How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, Price explains that since most natives could not read the Word to begin with it made a certain sense to them to cut the Bible up into small pieces to be shared among the populace. There were, in effect, two crimes against spirit in regard to books (especially Bibles): Reducing them to matter entirely—as waste paper, toilet tissue, fish-wrappers, pulp—or, at the other extreme, raising them to idols (bibliolatry). And more than Bibles have been worshipped or blasphemed. In 2009, Price notes, a British newspaper reported that old-age parishioners were buying up secondhand books from charity shops because they were cheaper than coal to burn. And the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, whose 1809 book Bibliomania went to the extreme of placing ecstatic emphasis on a book's exterior, might indeed be rightly accused of a certain materialist objectification of his possessions. He was known to search out uncut copies of books, whose pages he would not dream of defiling by way of cutting or reading.
From the too too sublime to the too too earthly, we should not be surprised that the natives did not grasp the missionaries' all too subtle and hardly reasonable conceptualization of a physical thing that was intended to inspire only spiritual musings. This dualism reiterates our cultural split and our perverse relationship with matter. Matter is either seen as base because it is bereft of all spirit, concept, and idea, or else somehow base via misplaced idolatry, i.e., fetishism. James Kearney, quoted by Price, notes that Christianity is "a religion of the book that was always made uneasy by the materiality of the text . . . The book became an emblem of the desire to transcend the merely material and irredeemably fallen world of objects." Despite this desire, "To evince a belief in the power of the object was to engage in a fundamental category mistake that separated superstitious and credulous others . . . from the rational European man."
Where there are taboos, there are powerful forces to repress. The marriage of the physical and the spiritual is just such a dangerous powerful force, and the attempt to dematerialize the book is one of many aimed at suppressing this power. Because magic books were mostly used as means to negotiate an often-terrifying relationship between a soul and a world—a world of wars, plagues, death in childbirth, unexplainable natural forces, and random, often brutal attacks by powerful and unpredictable rulers or marauding invaders—they were from the outset important magical objects in an ongoing attempt to attain some small agency, some small chance at self-actualization amid myriad mysterious powers. Knowledge is power. And the attempt to destroy books is a brutal but clever process of mocking the transcendental materiality of the books, a move to imperil or blot out the individual's right and ability to change his or her reality, to alter the world, to have agency outside of the already restricted policies and methods of the Church and State. The book is inherently anarchistic, but also paradoxically centralizing and essential to a shared cultural conversation.
Really, the first people who would argue that a book's body is not essential to its soul are those who do not want us to believe there is a direct and dynamic relationship between a book and the world, those who would have us prize a book as harmless or even frivolous. Another contingent are those who rail against authors and their authority and would replace individual expression with a many-voiced throng. At the other extreme, there are those who find themselves in a desperate situation wherein books are threatened by oppressive totalitarian governments (perhaps we are now in such a situation, though of our own making). Such persons will feel the need to exercise a certain bravado in declaring that the most important thing about a book cannot be destroyed, that the spirit of a book lives on even if it is incinerated, banned, or hidden away. It is some comfort to tell ourselves that we might memorize the contents of many books and carry them secretly from country to country and over generations if need were to arise, but it is probably more to the point to note, as Heine did most presciently in 1821, "When they have burned books, they will end in burning beings".
If we extend this treacherous analogy for more benign purposes, we may note that we need the physicality of the book just as the mind requires the physicality of the body, as "consciousness," in Susan Sontag's phrase, "is harnessed to flesh." The triad of Brain/Mind, Ideas, and World is mirrored by that of Book, Ideas, and World. If the mind, like the book, is not entirely a physical, static entity, it is at least fundamentally so; and if the ideas born within the mind impel a person to change his or her life and world, so too do the living words within a physical book touch and change the physical world.
Changes in the form of the book and of the technique of writing have moved over centuries in the direction of dematerialization. Books have become smaller and easier to transport and, now, finally, virtually body-less. The decrease in bulk and in the importance of the physical nature of the book has led to an expanded access, making books more readily available. This change has not occurred, however, without accompanying consequences or powerful ideological causes. In Book Illumination on the Middle Ages, Otto Pächt explains that the change from antiquity roll to medieval codex "coincided with a shift in intellectual outlook, in the values attached to experience of the physical world" leading, in extreme cases, to iconoclasm in the Eastern Mediterranean, and "a positive hostility to figurative art in the West," where there "was a growing inclination to regard external reality as a transient metaphor for the true, primary, and invisible transcendental world. A distinction began to be made between outward and inward looking".
When I first started studying art history, I was confounded by the way medieval artists seemed to have never seen the naturalistic works of the Greeks and Romans. Depictions of human bodies were suddenly flat, crude, and un-sensuous, but how had this transformation occurred? Surely not because of a decline in ability, but rather because of a radical shift in ideology. The medieval artist, as Pächt explains, looked at the physical world—if he did not look at it as a dangerous illusion—mainly as a symbol of some higher idea, and, thus, it was not only no longer necessary, but more or less frowned upon, to paint a body in all its glory. And yet the works of medieval art (especially in the realm of book illumination) are teeming with beauty, with vines and flowers and insects rendered joyously from nature, wound about and buzzing about symbolic patterns colored by inks and paints ground from pigments found in plants and minerals. The beauty of the natural world could not be repressed. It grew from the cracks left around the margins, irrepressibly erupting.
William Blake—perhaps the consummate artist of the book—later consciously combined the abstract with the physical, celebrating the nakedness of woman and the imagination which can move from two-fold to four-fold vision, transcending from the physical to the spiritual and back on a line of ink. As Kathryn Barush explains in Every Age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage,[1] Blake did not try to "outdo God's creation by undertaking mimetic expression." He "felt no need to over-articulate his images—an outline here, a wash of color there to indicate water, or The Vine of Life, or a tombstone was enough to leave the images open for interpretation". Barush, whose study of pilgrimage traces the anagogic relationship between real pilgrimage and visual depictions of the spiritual journey, notes that Reformation critics of pilgrimage often saw it "as an essentially earthly journey to a material shrine (or, at worst, idol)." Blake, who did not see the distinction between earthly and divine in the same way, saw his books, writes Barush, as sites of pilgrimage wherein "an immediate dialogue was created between the outward form and what was contained within." To trace the edges of his lines was "akin to a pilgrimage through the networks and streets and architectures of the imagination". To journey from physical to spiritual, the viewer requires a line etched by hand in metal and one drawn in the imagination.
But not all artists and thinkers were as adept as Blake in tracing the liminal space between spirit and matter. A common morality, already powerfully present in Blake's time, came to distinguish censoriously between those who cared for a book's spiritual qualities (its content) and those more concerned with its physicality (its binding), as if it were in all cases possible to delineate a dualist split between lovers of the surface and lovers of the depths, as if the surface did not correspond to the depths. Price writes, "Cover and content, authenticity and experience: the language of insides and outsides makes any consciousness of the book's material qualities signify moral shallowness . . . Not content to ignore the outsides of books, a good reader actively scorns them." To judge "by the cover of a book" has even proverbially come to be something wise people are supposed to avoid; we are instructed to be concerned with higher things, with inner beauty, with morality, with anything but the sensory experience of people, of our environment, of books and other objects, as if we were still living in a world where the pleasures of the flesh were thought of as dangerous and sinful delusions muddying our vision and inhibiting us from seeing an immaterial higher beauty. A contemporary morality has taken off where Platonism and Christianity left off, leaving us still suspicious of the physical when it comes to the realm of humanistic activity (love, reading, art), but somehow, we are still (or even more) earth-bound. And art, reading, and love (all activities that are both material and spiritual) may be endangered species in a world where material possession and accumulation vie with virtual pleasures for our attention and devotion. Here as elsewhere, the separation of spirit and matter spells hollowness.
Heirs to a centuries-old taboo against inhering spirit in matter (idolatry, fetishism, or the scandal of uniting romantic and sexual love), we carry unexamined fixed ideas along with us—ideas which, while simulating freedom from the burden of the physical and promising infinite choice and immediate access to everything we could want, instead work to undermine the magical and necessary intercourse between world and word, body and soul, individual and social system, book and binding. I challenge the idea that books are merely transmitters of ideas or non-physical abstractions (or, more damaging still, information, data) and that they thus could be replaced by machines which can process or hold an infinite number of words without altering their effects—as if paper, skin, hides, parchment, bark, leaves, ink, pigment, blood, hands, oils, mortars and pestles, inscribing, carving, and burning were not in themselves essential processes of transmission, vivification, re-generation of the Word and its in-spired Breath. The spirit of an idea is like a match that is only lit when the hand inscribes it into material substance, willing it to alter physical as well as spiritual reality—believing in it, in other words, and manifesting its reality by literally going through the ritual motions of writing, engraving, embedding, making. The little match girl's flame, alas, had nothing to catch on but itself, and went out far too soon.
The machine—its plasticity, its anonymity, its practical purpose as proliferator of consumable reproductions or simulations—in contrast to the papery substance of a book, destroys the magical aura of the ritual object (a work of art and a work of mind) that is the book. The machine reduces the alchemical transmission of ideas, poetry, essence, atmosphere, voice, artistry, individuality, time, space, margin, attention, and concentration to a material and economic exchange of data commodity.
The printing press was, indeed, a form of mechanical reproduction, and one decried by some. A. W. Schlegel's lecture, "Critique of Enlightenment" (ca.1801) counts printing as one of the crimes of the Reformation, though not for the same reasons expostulated by the Catholic church. Oral rhapsodization, he writes, "arouses an entirely different suspense and attention than lonely unsocial reading. But the printing of books itself has stolen to a great extent the magic of writing. Because of the difficulty of attaining books, a single one was already a precious possession that was passed down from generation to generation: it was a romantic poverty." In brackets, Schlegel here has inserted a reminder to himself to discuss the "custom of keeping books chained," another evidence of the way books were once esteemed as precious and even worthy of stealing.
"Now," Schlegel continues, "due to the ease of ownership people have become so casual about owning the most excellent book, that they mostly read it without any devotion, but rather for thoughtless distraction. In contrast, the desire for a book in those days had grown so great that one could barely stand to be bereft of one, and one had to attain one through a transcription, and princes would send messengers to this end back and forth." Further, Schlegel laments the general influence of the Enlightenment on Poesie, an influence that can be felt today in arguments for the practicality of virtual transmission: "The exclusive orientation toward the useful, when taken to its conclusion, must really mean a farewell to Poesie."
The cheapening of the book trade and the subsequent slippage from physical to virtual books would certainly have disturbed Schlegel even more. The printing press is a machine which has taken us further away from oral transmission and the community that such rhapsodizing encouraged, and then again away from the idiosyncratic beauty and uniqueness of hand-illuminated manuscripts, but the increasing commodification and homogenization of texts has taken us far further than he could have imagined. As we move toward increasing the utility, convenience, and immediate accessibility of books, we lose a great deal of what makes them magical.
The printing press is a machine, yet one that creates weighty objects that can be held and carried—objects featuring gilded and embossed bindings, decorative endpapers, and fans of curling textured paper made from natural materials. When printed on a letter-press, the text on those pages is literally pressed into the paper with an imprint that can be felt with one's fingertips. Some people compare those who regret the shift from hand-illuminated books to printed books with those who decry today's dematerialization of books, poo-poo-ing the latter's concerns as nostalgia and resistance to change—but to pretend that the transformation occurring today is strictly analogous would be facile. Printing also diminishes the personal and sensuous nature of the book, rendering the letters uniform and the pages more and more smooth and devoid of texture, but today's technological reproduction is even more dematerialized, still colder, merely virtual. Such transmission of ideas may empty even the most revolutionary gesture of its magic in three important ways: by removing the essential physical element of the experience; by turning it into a sound bite, a simulation, a momentary fragment; and by diminishing through technology's pervasive presence in our lives the ability of the viewer, observer, or reader to concentrate, appreciate, and experience whatever is being shared. The reception of these reduced and reassembled reproductions makes them something different than what they were, while providing the illusion that one is really experiencing the work or the image. People think they know or understand a painting viewed or a poem read on a machine amid myriad interruptions and distractions; but such experiences may be worse than nothing, like a fake rose without a scent. No wonder young people turn away from literature and art to other pleasures; the subtle aroma, the rose's very essence, is no longer present, and a rose is no longer a rose at all.
After my grandparents died, I was surprised to discover two elaborately decorated tallit bags (pouches used to hold the ritual items of orthodox practice), embroidered with the initials of my grandfather and his father, tucked away behind rows of papers and photo albums in their house. My grandfather was a completely secular Jew who, outliving the Holocaust, came to this country with little more than a small suitcase, his wife, and their little daughter—my mother. He must have packed and preserved these tallit bags throughout their hiding, their numerous moves, while so many other objects had gone missing, things which might have been, on the surface, more useful to his life as a doctor, a lover of music, and a new immigrant struggling to learn English and support his family in New York City. Why did a man as practical as he, a man who had little time or sympathy for dreaming or mysticism, keep these physical symbols of his Jewishness even when they might have been the cause of discovery and death for himself and his family? Why were mere ideas not enough to preserve some sense of a heritage to which he was still connected and a religion he had largely rejected? Perhaps these bags were for him like the Ark of the Covenant for the wandering Jews, a physical embodiment of home where there was no central stable place.
Régis Debray, in his essay "The Book as Symbolic Object," explains that Greek culture had sacred places, if not books; Jewish culture had only its sacred book, "always kept under the mantle, as the substitute for an absent place." The Ark of the Covenant was a "portable covered conveyance often represented as a miniature temple of Solomon. The book is . . . the mobile center of the exile's or nomad's existence . . . Our hearth and home, we who have none, is the book of books, the codexical Gospel, patria of expatriates. . . . It is stable, tangible, indubitable." The original codex, large, architectonic, hand-bound, with clasps, served as "a pledge of legitimacy and permanence, a shelter against the flight of time, degeneration, death. . . ."
Today, when fluidity and decentralization are the catchwords of utopia, the bodiless, placeless book may be a perfect test case in the problems inherent in a total embrace of a decentralized, rhizomatic, fragmented, multi-vocal, infinite network. Chartier writes of the dream of a universal library and notes that the burned library of Alexandria was "an exemplary and mythic figure of this nostalgia for lost exhaustiveness." Referring to our current capabilities, Chartier notes that a library without walls creates "immeasurable possibilities," but also does "violence to the texts by separating them from the original physical forms in which they appeared and which helped to constitute their historical significance." The dream of democratization of knowledge has been pursued in parallel to that of a library without walls, and we can trace the technological means by which this open access has been approached over centuries. The first stage of democratization, as noted by Vico, may have been the invention of an alphabet. A hundred-and-twenty thousand hieroglyphic characters, difficult to master, were replaced by a few letters, as Chartier cites. Vico calls the Greek alphabet "vulgar letters" "because they break the priestly and aristocratic monopoly over images and signs," emancipating "knowledge from the all-powerful hold of divine reason or an absolute state authority." Much later, Martin Luther expanded the readership of the Bible by translating it into the vulgate (which then was repeated in other languages as well), and Gutenberg expanded readership still further through the popularization of printing. In America, the public education system continues to be an open experiment in expanded cultural literacy and informed citizenry; advocates of new technologies hawk their programs to schools as cure-alls for the troubled student whose primary problem may well be the pervasive presence of technology in our society.
The history of writing and the book (from orality to writing, from hieroglyph to alphabet, from roll to codex, from handwritten manuscript to printed book, from authored work to anonymous text, from anonymous text to multi-authored screen) seems to have been in the interest of a gradual and steady democratization of knowledge and voice, yet there are many questions still to be answered about the extent to which these new methods of communication have really worked to liberate humanity or to increase the agency of individuals. One important question is about the value of universal access to an infinite amount of information. Might not such easy access be fundamentally at odds with an actual deep engagement in selected and specific knowledge? Both the printing press and the virtual book involve a wide proliferation of texts and, thus, seem to serve the cause of the democratization of knowledge, but significantly these developments have garnered different enemies. The people up in arms about the printing press were explicitly concerned with stopping this spread of the word and with the implied decentralization of power; critics today who lament the demise of the physical book have nothing against spreading culture or knowledge, but are concerned about how the loss will work toward destroying whatever culture we have left. We fear that, instead of spreading knowledge, the virtual text spreads information and data as commodities while divorcing a work from its context and its place in history and space. And, though it may be true that some proponents of new media are in favor of authorless or multi-authored texts, and that those protecting the sanctity of the physical book have a vested interest in defending the role of the author, any attempt to attribute anti-populist tendencies to the defenders of authorship is a gross simplification of the problem. The real question is, are we more or less empowered or disempowered by fragmentation and dispersal? Electronic media can provide the illusion of an infinite number of choices; in reality, there is no need to make a choice at all as the possibilities proliferate, unbounded. We must (to make art, to act ethically) choose, reject, favor, select out, discriminate, say yes to one thought and no to another—for at some point (which we have probably already reached), to welcome all is to welcome nothing, and to have all is to have nothing at all.
We now have access to almost any piece of writing or any image at a moment's notice, but the "work" has been reduced to "text" as Roland Barthes had hopefully predicted in his famous essay "From Work to Text," in what now looks like an excess of revolutionary zeal; the reverberating image has become an often all-too-shabby reproduction. A two-pronged and antithetical force is driving technological reproduction: on one hand, the corporate technocratic progress-mongers who are always ready to sell us some new "necessary" commodity; on the extreme other, the radical theorists—such as Derrida, Foucault, de Certeau, Benjamin, or Barthes—have, in an attempt to revolutionize society, worked in the past century to divest art and culture of their position as magical experiences. How is it that two such antithetical motives arrive at the same end? Perhaps certain strains of contemporary thought harbor an inherent nihilism that aims to overturn the language and culture of the Enlightenment "oppressors," even if that means dispensing with cultural discourse altogether. As Carlo Ginzburg writes in his introduction to The Cheese and the Worms, while discussing Foucault's "archeology of silence," this strain of thought may be more interested in the "act and criteria of the exclusion" by rational scientific discourse of the non-literate, than in giving the excluded a voice or in empowering the excluded to be author of their own story. Rather than embolden new authors, the deconstructionists would de-author. The author, who uses the language of an oppressive heritage, himself becomes an authority figure to be overthrown. Thus, we should not be surprised that rebellious thinkers have often rallied to replace the individual authority with a multi-voiced throng of ever-changing authors. The fallacy here is the idea that writers of what Roland Barthes calls "Works," as opposed to those who now write "Texts," have presented a homogenous party line that asserts absolute and eternal truths. In "From Work to Text," Barthes makes a glaringly simplistic differentiation between what he sees as the mono-voiced authority of the static Work of the past and the multi-voiced jouissance of the Text of the near future (now upon us), forgetting that a mob can just as easily speak in one oppressive voice as can an individual. Anyone who loves and knows literature will have trouble recognizing beloved books in Barthes's description of a "work" as static, monistic, Newtonian. Ignoring Shakespeare's celebrated irreducibility, what Keats termed "negative capability," Barthes writes, "The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy. . . . for such a philosophy, plural is Evil. . . . The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes text to work can bring with it fundamental changes in reading . . . diffraction of meanings. . . ." Barely hidden in Barthes' critique of the text is a suspicion of the material: "the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses) . . . the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of discourse."
Vilifying the process of making worlds through writing not only calls into question the power of Enlightenment elites, but simultaneously robs any individual dreamer, utopian, reformer, or renegade of the possibility of creating alternative worlds, thereby disempowering personal agency and existential action and leaving so-called reality a stubborn and static master. Let she who can seize power, seize pen, seize voice, and speak for the liberation of us all. The repression of voice comes from two sides, one which wants people to be passive and the other which laments our powerlessness but does not want to use the tools of the "oppressors" and so languishes in victimhood. People do express themselves every day via electronic platforms, yet the medium—favoring as it does the fluid, authorless infinity of voices—reduces such expression to a fatally compromised and muffled message. Although some platforms are certainly more bounded than others, the "user" (compare "user" with "reader" and worlds of difference are revealed), can always easily abandon any site for another with casual ease.
To cry out at every change (innovation, revolution, devolution) in social practices would indeed be reactionary, but we must recognize that these changes proceed in tandem with ideological principles (either as impetus or result) which fundamentally alter our relationship with, in this case, knowledge, culture, agency, and authorship. Many today would like to insist that new forms of reading do not significantly alter the essence or content of what is read or threaten the existence of traditional forms. Benjamin, in his paradoxical essay celebrating the revolutionary changes in what a work of art was in the "age of mechanical reproduction," exposes the fallacy of this assurance. Instead of pretending that the medium does not alter the message, his entire essay is a celebration of the way in which the new abilities of technological reproduction will destroy—in violent cataclysm—the ritual and cult value of art. "Every day," he writes, "the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction . . . To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction". The dematerialization of the art object in its original state is a function of equalizing and ultimately destroying what made it valuable in the first place. Benjamin made a devil's bargain in a moment of extreme historical crisis, giving up what he knew to be essential to art in the fight against totalitarianism. What is especially tragic about this deal is that the overcoming of distance, the destruction of the ability to concentrate, and the lure of the simulacrum were all already being used at the time of his writing by totalitarian regimes to increase surveillance, create a sense of being everywhere at once, to proliferate treacherous mythic images, to simulate meaning, and to dazzle (shock and awe). The bargain presupposed that the destruction of the aura would really bring liberation. Instead, where there had been sacredness, ritual, and humanistic communication of values, the technocracy has all-too often replaced real meaning with its simulacrum, not improving art with an engaged politics, but vitiating it with advertising and, even more treacherously, with totalitarian or at least tendentiously ideological propaganda. In most ways, the destruction of the aura has brought superficial simulated consumerism, a void of values and meaning where any ad man can slip in and provide a sense of meaning.
My defense of the book as sacred object is connected to defense of author—questioning the idée reçu that associates the literate individualized voice with the stuffy oppressors and forces of the status quo, and the robust collective voice of the relatively illiterate with all sorts of good things like freedom, collaboration, and an end to hierarchical thinking. The voice of the individual author has, in countless examples to the contrary, been raised on the side of liberation and humanism, and one might even dare to state that all good writing, all great "works" of literature are, contrary to Barthes's critique, open-ended, participatory, dialogic, alive. And this living voice can be best proliferated by the continual making of books.
While I would not go so far as to advocate returning to the days before printing, I do see some salutary benefit in a renaissance of alternative individual book production. As a response to the current glut of technology, people may be returning to the physical, even handmade book for a radically individual and non-mediated means of communication. The proliferation of the physical handmade book is unhindered by secular or religious dogma, free of publishers' marketing concerns, free of the need to please the public or society. Anyone may make a handmade book and give it away right now, without using any electronic technology at all—or may make a small edition on a hand-powered letterpress. Of course, without the help of printing of some kind, one would have to transcribe the book by hand to give out more than one—or the recipient would have to—but the act of inscribing and re-inscribing only multiplies the magical potential of the offering. Blake, as is well known, hand-etched all of his plates (backwards!) and then hand-colored the prints. He might have made more copies by resorting to a different method, but they would have been entirely different books. Now we must actively work to re-connect, re-animate, re-inspire the magical relation between matter and spirit through processes that will seem merely superstitious to those unable to see their significance. We must consciously enact rituals that consummate imaginary desires with real manifestations, with paper, folding, pressing; we must embody performances that bind words to pages, we must burn and carve inscriptions into wood and leather, stitch prayers and incantations into silk and skin, weave enchantments out of hair, willow branches, spun wool. We must build guerrilla libraries in the streets, re-purpose telephone booths as public book stalls, proliferate broadsides, burn spells into fallen leaves, and scatter them in the porticos of office buildings. We must laboriously trace the lineaments of Celtic knots and Arabian mosaics, illuminating impossibly large pages with the smallest of quills. We must believe in the magic of books.
What is a book? A record, a new thing, a reflection, its own shining, a synthesis of all that there already was or is into something never before in existence? A book, as a novel arrangement of ideas and images in new proportions, needs to exist in space and to take its place next to all the already existent objects of the world—not erased or deleted, but firmly present in weight and dimension, density, thickness, and height. In-scription, in-spiration. What is spiritual in a book must interact with the physical, with carving, with breath; it must push up against what already is, against a resistance of the real. Lacking weight, a book lacks substance, lacks power, heft, lacks reality. If imagination is to gain credence, have purchase over status quo, it must be given body in art, in the author-ity of the book bound with intention and care. A book exists in the in-between liminal realm between that which already is and that which is mere fancy or thought. It is not frozen or fixed like reality as a given event, choice, object, or mode of life, but is still freely intermediary as possibility, as embodied experiment, an offering . . . as one book among many, next to other books, a midrash, conversation, over ages, timelessly present.
What is a book? A considered arrangement of words and ideas and images, a statement or explanation of passionate concerns, it is bound on both sides, necessitating some choice, closure, temporary decision and selecting out. It is not the whole world, though it may offer itself as microcosm, as metaphor for the whole. It is a contribution to the larger cosmos, one voice in a choir. It is observer and witness and also evidence and artifact; it is a record of what happened and of what did not, of what is and what could be, a polemic, an elegy, a wish and a regret. What is a book? A moment and a time traveler, a reflection of the present and a conversation reaching backward over time and forward into the future, speaking with the long dead and booming forth so that the now living can speak with those who have not yet been born,
There are particular volumes we love, the Vie de Bohême, passed around and signed; as each person reads it, he or she becomes a member of the Bohemian club: the favorite foxed Keats, the Hafiz with the golden marbleized silk, the crimson leather Looking Glass, purchased in Bath. And together they make up a rainbow, their variegated spines lining the walls, the cocoons of our studies that are like another layer of mind around our skulls, where the ideas and fancies can circulate, where we might even open up a volume to refresh our memories as we reach into the repositories of the mind itself when grasping after a word, a passage, a line that haunts us. We may find a pressed flower, a lover's beribboned lock, a note slipped in by former readers or by unknown friends who stopped some afternoon, like us, upon a special passage in the same book, and reflected on its import as the rain poured down outside, or sun, or hail, or cannon fire. A book may have travelled far in time and space, and seen many things it does not tell straight out, though tell it might were we to read between its lines and trace the signs on spine and endpapers, in foxings, spills, folds, inset slips of paper or leaves, annotations and marginalia, and other tokens of lives once lived. Conversations with the ages, and curious bookmarks from book stores long gone under. . . .
The smell of a book, said my friend Stephen Callahan, is like the smell of a woman; one loves it if one loves the woman. And, I add, whosoever does not love the smell of women and men and books, well . . . for them there is no help.
There are the books put away in annexes because they were for special tastes only, yet when the exotic seeker finds them he feels himself as lucky as any treasure hunter, though decades had gone by before anyone dreamed of wanting them. There are books tied up with string, brittle leather covers crumbling, pages falling out like loose teeth and the thin white hair of sages, still whispering wisdom, but so low we must lean in close to hear, before they turn entirely to dust and the secrets are lost forever.
To see the collected libraries of beloved long dead authors, the books they read and gazed at from their chairs, thumbed and pored over, perused and fell asleep beside, read from to a lover or a daughter, fervently sighed or fulminated over . . . to touch the passages where they were first discovered, in original margins and on the page—atop, below, betwixt one page and the next—can mean so much . . . what word is underlined, what drop of sweat atop what page, what well-worn even dog-eared much returned-to creased passage? Will there even be libraries like these in the future, or will the writers and readers of tomorrow leave no trace at all of their obsessions, their particular passions, even their guilty pleasures, of the concatenation of strange taste next to more catholic, of ancient next to contemporary, of scientific next to fantastical, or poetical alongside logical treatise . . . no trace at all of what, if anything, they cared enough about to own, to arrange, to carry, to move in heavy boxes from house to house, nor what of all the wit and wisdom of the world was granted a place in the limited space of their mortal book shelves.
A book will show its age and the age of what was written in it. Its binding faded and pages foxed and worn, its weathered pages tell a history. If it survived a fire, say, or was salvaged, water-logged, from a flood, swollen and heroic, its pages like the waves themselves, no virgin parchments more, but experienced travelers, a testament to salty, briny life, and death and grit. It carries more than just its content, its body itself is encrusted with life, with barnacles and breath, signs of contact with the past and signs to carry into the future, as messages of what we loved and of what we thought and dreamed.
A book has a place of origin, a home and history, bound in the materials of its birthplace, of Spanish leather or Chinese silk, in Irish linen or American flax, in Japanese rice paper, or Indian hemp, its type and design teeming with tell-tale signs, its orthography shifting from decade to decade, with emphasis in black letter or in san serif, hand-colored or with gilded spine, embossed and crammed with delicate serigraph portraits and etched maps and charts that fold out and expand the very world.
It has a place and time of death; when the spine is so cracked it falls off of itself and reveals the interior organs of the book, what old papers were used to glue on the spine, and what string used to stitch. When the book begins to die we see how it was born, and marvel at the sturdy but delicate art that bound the separate fascicles, and married the cover boards to the rest, with marbleized or silken end papers. We see its hopeful beginning, as it was christened with colophon and edition, and sent out into the world; and though its title might be barely visible, rubbed off by many loving fingers, and its leaves are close to crumbling, perused over centuries by our fellows, we can take it one more time up to our noses and inhale its smell of life and moldering decay, and in this bouquet we recognize our own fate, and listen carefully to the whisperings of this old sage, as the pages crumble in our hands. There is always that last moment when we know that to turn the page may be to consign it to oblivion; yet we hope that it may speak to us one last time, so we dare, and touch, and hasten thereby the inevitable force of time. But, oh, my mortal friends, this is life. And a well-made book, although it comes to crumble and fall to dust, lasts much longer than most of us.
[1] Barush's 2011 dissertation at Oxford University has been published by Ashgate Press as Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain, 1790-1850.
*A version of this essay was published in The Georgia Review Winter 2015. Images are from The Almandal Grimoire Book Portal, a room-sized accordion book inscribed and illuminated by the author with the words of this essay in 2018.