The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Alphabet in Motion: Artist Kelli Anderson’s Wondrous Pop-up Biography of the Letters

By Maria Popova

Alphabet in Motion: Artist Kelli Anderson’s Wondrous Pop-up Biography of the Letters

It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and gave it form so we can hear it with our eyes and see with our minds, making shapes for sounds and meaning from the shapes.

We take it for granted now, this makeshift miracle permeating every substrate of our lives, and go on tasking these tiny concrete things with conveying our most immense and abstract ideas. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth’s largest living organism, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archeological artifact, touches more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters carry the history of our species and of our world, their shapes shaped by a conversation between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped.

Kelli Anderson, maker of material magic, brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape — a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter.

Through a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelli shines a dazzling light on how we went from ink to lead to pixel, drawing on everything from Plato’s Cratylus to an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom to (which sparked the concept of the first computer code in the fertile mind of the the young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to conjure up the digital universe.

In one of the wonderful short essays accompanying each letter, she writes:

For many cultures over time, the A’s triangular form has represented strength and stability. This association likely originated in the physical world. The triangle is is the most stable load-bearing shape because it distributes force and tension to either side of its wide base. In terms of physics, the majority of simple machines utilize the triangle’s intrinsic morphological power: the wedge, inclined plane, and lever all work thanks to their triangular forms.

Long before physics provided a cogent explanation, early human civilizations had observed and utilized the structural strength of the triangle in their architecture and simple machines. By extension, for hundreds of years across the Hellenic world, the A was thought to have the power to curse and to heal, and regularly appeared in religious and medicinal rituals. The letter A neatly connected symbolic mysticism with the demonstrable power of the built world. (There exists a symmetry between “to spell” and “a spell.”)

Observing that “every letter has a long history,” Kelli traces the lineage of A:

The A we recognize today is the result of various cultures’ remapping of this shape to sights and concepts of local environments.

The A’s triangular form begins in Egypt in 3100 BCE as a pictogram of a perched eagle, a bird central to ancient Egyptian religion.

The more agrarian-minded Phoenicians transformed the eagle into aleph (from the Hebrew word for “ox”). Now rotated, this bovine appears in profile with its horns pointing to the right, its nose to the left. A vertical line defines the back of the ox’s head, which introduces the A’s horizontal crossbar.

One of the great blind spots of our cultural hindsight is the continuity of ideas — we look back and gasp at what appears as a breakthrough, failing to see its combinatorial nature, the way everything builds on what came before. Kelli writes:

The word “text” comes from the Latin verb texere, which means “to weave” (hence the origin of an expression like “to spin a yarn”). Computers, which were first used for typesetting and are direct technological descendants of weaving, seem to perfectly bridge texere’s dual meanings. Weaving is a binary technology: Its vertical warp and horizontal weft (and the way those two components, together, render a yarn visible/invisible) are a precursor to how the 1s and 0s of today’s computers work. Woven binary code memory served as the rudimentary computer navigation system onboard the Apollo 11 mission.

Alongside the paper playground of ideas is a rigorously researched magazine chronicling the history of technology and the evolution of typography. What emerges is something thoroughly unexampled: part pop-up exploratorium, part encyclopedia, part wunderkammer with twenty-six compartments of wonder, part homage to the unsung heroes who, working in the shadow of their time and place, shaped the modern world.

Alphabet in Motion, the tactile delight of which is thoroughly untranslatable onto a digital screen, lives in that rare place where imagination and illumination meet to become a portal of wonder — the gift of a lifetime.

BP

How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species

By Maria Popova

How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species

We walk this earth as bewildered animals trying to recover the divinity within — descendants of the great apes who invented gods to mirror back to us the best in ourselves and bridle the worst, but we are still and always have been our own only shepherds.

In times of crisis for humanity, amid the genocides and the wars and the burning forests and the firing squads of self-righteousness, the only true remedy is to remember what it means to be human — the complexity of it, the contradictions, the panoply of capacities from which get to choose in becoming who we are, as persons and as peoples.

Every crisis of and for humanity is evidence that we have forgotten what we are — what Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883–April 10, 1931), writing in the interlude between two world wars, calls a “divinity which walks among the nations and speaks of love, pointing toward the paths of life, while the people laugh and mock its words and teachings.” In The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (public library) — the wonderful collection of meditations, essays, and poems drawn from Gibran’s Arabic writings about the spiritual life — he writes:

We were a silent, hidden thought in the folds of oblivion, and we have become a voice that causes the heavens to tremble.

We were a faint spark buried in the ash, but have become a fire blazing above the sheltered ravine.

Art by Ariana Fields from What Do You Know? by Aracelis Girmay

An epoch before Maya Angelou reckoned with our multitudes in her breathtaking spaceborne poem, insisting that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Gibran considers what it would take for us, “scions of the apes,” to attain spiritual perfection as a species:

Humankind will proceed toward perfection when it feels that humanity is: A limitless sky and a shoreless ocean, an ever-blazing flame, an eternally gleaming light, a wind when it gusts and when it is calm, a cloud when it thunders and lightnings and rains, a stream when it sings or roars, a tree when it blossoms in the spring and disrobes in the autumn, a mountain when it towers, a valley when it descends, and a field when it is fertile or barren.

When humankind has felt all these things, it will have reached the midpoint in its path toward perfection. If it wishes to arrive at the road to perfection, it must, if it perceives its own essence, feel that humanity is: An infant relying on its mother, a mature man responsible for his dependents, a youth lost among his desires and passions, an elderly man whose past and future wrestle with one another, a worshipper in his hermitage, a criminal in his cell, a scholar amidst his books and papers, a fool between the black of night and the dark of his day, a nun among the flowers of her faith and the thorns of her loneliness, a prostitute between the talons of her weakness and the claws of her neediness, the indigent between his bitterness and complaisance, the rich man between his ambitions and his submission, the poet between the fog of his evenings and the rays of his dawns.

Should humankind prove able to experience and know all these things, it will arrive at perfection and become one shadow among the shadows of Gods.

If you could use some kindling for the fire of your faith in humanity, warm yourself with the story of how humanity saved the ginkgo and with E.B. White’s magnificent response to a man who had lost faith in humanity, then revisit Gibran on the building blocks of friendship, how to raise children, and how to weather the uncertainties of love.

BP

Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World

By Maria Popova

Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World

It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.

My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert’s almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life.

THANKS
by W.S. Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

Couple with Billy Collins’s ode to gratitude, then revisit Albert Camus, writing in the middle of a world war, on how to live whole in a broken world, and Oliver Sacks, writing at the event horizon of death, on the deepest measure of gratitude.

BP

Love Against Probability

By Maria Popova

You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink, and your eye that took 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the continental plates beneath are drifting apart, and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf the length of the continent, carrying the weight of consciousness, and consciousness, how it windows this tenement of breath and bone with wonder, how it hovers over everything, gigantic and unnecessary, like love.

It is all so improbable, this wild and wondrous world, against all we know about the universe. And yet here it is, and here we are, set on it to know that we are dying and live anyway, and love anyway.

Our most beautiful, most transformative, most vivifying experiences and encounters are like that — they enter our lives through the back door of expectation, shattering the laws of probability with the golden gavel of the possible.

In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship (public library), poet and philosopher David Whyte captures the terror and transcendence we are hurled into as we encounter, without looking for it, “a degree of mutually encoded knowledge” with another person that touches the center of our being and discomposes the superstructure of life as we know it.

Lee Miller and Friend by Man Ray. Paris, 1930.

Whyte considers the insuperable force of truth pulsating beneath our resistance to such experiences:

Something inside the protective walls of… our established sense of our self may be preparing us, willingly or unwillingly, for an emancipation, a life beyond it which if intuited too early might be frightening to us, beyond our ability to reach.

Trying to navigate the situation, we tend to rely on the intellect to “to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and weigh things in the balance,” forgetting its immense blind spots and, still victims of Descartes all those epochs later, forgetting that the most alive parts of life are often profoundly unreasonable. Whyte writes:

Beneath [our intellectual assessments], untiring but seldom listened to, we have…. a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and what is bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being.

It is not easy, this reconstitution of the self, this uncharted exploration of the possible in the improbable. But if the universe can do it, so can the living fractals of it that we are.

Couple with David Whyte’s staggering poem about reaching beyond our self-limiting stories about love, then revisit paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley on the first and final truth of life.

BP

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