Brookes conceives of his latest book, Writing Beyond Writing, as the second installment in a trilogy that began with An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets and will conclude with the project he is working on now, a book called By Hand that is due out in November. The first volume was his initiation into the subject of scripts throughout the world, the second forced him to consider what he has learned about the very act of writing, and the third will focus on writing’s transformation from a manual act to a digital phenomenon.
The following interview was conducted via Zoom on May 5, 2025.
—Steven G. Kellman
Let’s jump in with this question: What is the Endangered Alphabets Project?
You’d think I’d have a nice crisp answer by now, but the truth is, alphabets are like a hedgehog—they stick out in lots of different directions. The Endangered Alphabets Project is an extremely small nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and preserving minority and emerging scripts from around the world through advocacy, education, and the creation of art work and educational material. The Endangered Alphabets Project began as a wood carving/script preservation project, when I carved Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in a dozen minority scripts and exhibited them and gave talks about script loss. Then it became a research project as I set out to find every script in use in the world and assess the degree of vulnerability of each one. At the same time I realized I had to become an advocate for these cultures and their writing forms, so I began to create educational materials and games.
But what in particular drew you to this project? After your work as a teacher, soccer coach, tour guide, guitarist, and commentator for NPR, what magic is there in alphabets that made you want to spend years researching them?
I must point out that I have no background or training in linguistics or anthropology, and I come to art and woodworking as a self-taught amateur. In the autumn of 2008, I started making Christmas presents for my family by carving Chinese characters into wood. From there, I began branching out into carving other scripts into wood. Many of them were either endangered or no longer widely used. On an assignment in India for National Geographic, I had come across Malayalam, which I had never seen anything like, and it just fascinated me. And I thought, maybe I’ll try carving something in Malayalam. I just Googled Malayalam, and it took me to omniglot.com and of course, many of your readers will be familiar with Omniglot, although at the time, Simon was really just kind of starting out, so it wasn’t nearly as developed as it is now. I started looking through Omniglot, and several things struck me. One was, I’m a pretty well traveled person, but many of these scripts and languages I had never heard of. Secondly, time and again in his brief narrative about the script, he would say things like, no longer taught in schools, no longer used for official purposes, only used by, I don’t know, map makers, only used by women to write secret love letters. And I thought: This is really interesting. I had never heard of script loss before, and I decided that I would carve some text in a number of these scripts.
I realized that there was every chance that this would be too much for me and I would give up and/or die in the enterprise. So I decided to set it up in such a way that I couldn’t quit. At the time, I was the director of the writing program at Champlain College in Burlington, and I arranged an exhibition of art by students and faculty, and my carvings were going to be like the centerpiece of this. So I would be letting everybody down if I didn’t do it, and I had no idea how long these would take me. I was using as my text Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because that’s on all or most of the Omniglot pages, because it’s available through the UN. I was disappointed that, in many cases, the UN actually chose to use a Latin transliteration of the original script rather than the original, and I decided to help them with retrieving the original scripts. I actually spent a lot of time trying to find, for example, Balinese. It took me a year back then to find somebody who could read and write Balinese and could send me the UDHR Article One in the Balinese script and language. So that was how it all began.
I did the exhibition. I did twelve different scripts, and people said two things that really changed my life at that point. One was, “This is art,” which I hadn’t thought I had done. Both my daughters are artists. My mother was an artist. I see myself as a writer and a guitarist. And so when someone said, “This is art,” I kind of looked over my shoulder—Who said that? But they were insistent. They said: “You know, you’ve done something which is, like, unique and original in art.” And the second thing they said was, “This is really important. You have to keep doing this.” I realized that I had this great blessing, which is that I had discovered my life’s work at the age of fifty-six.
And that’s where it all began.
Human beings die. Why can’t scripts be allowed to die?
Even the briefest study of any minority script shows that it is a minority script for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with its inherent linguistic values. So, for example, in what is now central Vietnam, there was for centuries a kingdom called Champa that was, by all accounts, not only independent and fairly prosperous but also stable. Its inhabitants were either Hindu or Muslim; they coexisted. Over the course of two hundred years, bits of the kingdom were bitten off by the emperor of Burma and the emperor of Vietnam, and, eventually, in the nineteenth century, the emperor of Vietnam overran Champa, which now no longer has a physical existence.
One of the things that happens when one culture conquers another is that it becomes the first priority to degrade the losers to the point that they no longer see themselves as an independent culture and therefore they no longer think of rebellion. One of the ways of convincing a people that they are not a culture with an integrity of its own is to destroy their script. It is easier to destroy a script than a language.
So we have many instances throughout history, not least the activities of Diego de Landa among the Spanish in South America, where there was a deliberate and extensive attempt to eradicate all writing in the local script. And it’s also interesting to see—just to give an instance of how potent a weapon that is—what else the conquerors did at the same time. So what Diego de Landa did, at the same time as destroying all the Mayan codices, was to torture all the Mayan nobility in the most extreme and grievous ways to get them to renounce their independent identity. What happened in the kingdom of Champa, or the ex-kingdom of Champa, was that the king of Vietnam ordered that all Hindus be forced to eat beef, and all Muslims be forced to eat pork. So this is an interesting kind of analogy, because it shows how much the script is as much a part of their identity as, for example, their religious and dietary beliefs. And both of them were used as mechanisms for trying to undermine and destroy any possible resistance by an overrun community.
You use several terms in discussing scripts, including “alphabet,” “syllabary,” “abugida,” and “abjad.” How do these relate to your interests in preservation, and are there important distinctions to be made among them in terms of script extinction?
One of the difficult questions that people ask me that I don’t yet have a good answer for is: “What is writing?” But what I am sure of is that writing as defined by traditional Western dictionaries and encyclopedias is certainly not everything that I consider writing. Consequently, the things that I consider most interesting in the study of writing in the abstract go well beyond those categories. All of this was pushed into the forefront of my thinking when I carved one of the Adinkra symbols from Ghana—I think it was Aya the fern—and posted it on Facebook and a very well-known linguist responded by saying: “That’s very nice, but it’s not writing.”
My first thought, of course, having no formal training and accreditation in linguistics, was to think I’d been making a terrible mistake all this time, and I didn’t know what I am talking about. And I spent a considerable amount of time looking at how writing was and still is defined. What I realized was that the way writing is defined in the Euro-American tradition is really a way of limiting the range of what was considered writing to the forms that were familiar to scholars, missionaries, and colonial administrators from the West, but also it deliberately excluded forms that I thought of as writing, such as the Adinkra symbols of Ghana that were dismissed as being primitive or backward by the Westerners who came into contact with them.
And much of my work has actually been to get people to think about writing in broader terms than purely phonetic representation, because the people who defined writing purely as phonetic representation had their own agenda. I wanted to have a different agenda, so for me writing is a much broader range of representations of meaning. It includes not only the Adinkra symbols but also the Nsibidi symbols, for example, that are used and are, in some sense, in revival, actually for narrative purposes. It includes the Sona characters of the Chokwe people, where the writing is not even static; it’s actually part of a narrative technique that involves drawing a line in the sand, which is the storyline of the educational narrative that’s being told. Similar things happen in Vanuatu. So I would rather err on the side of being inclusive and respectful than exclusive and disrespectful.
The other thing is that what is happening in the West is that we ourselves are rapidly incorporating graphic elements that would typically not be thought of as writing into our writing. I’m talking about emoji, but I’m also talking about other things. Well, there was a big exhibition recently at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of information through symbols. In particular, they focused on the guy who invented the symbols used for the Olympics, because here you have people speaking one hundred to two hundred different languages, and there has to be something that they can all understand. Similarly, the Adinkra symbols had this great virtue, like European road signs, where you can convey meaning in an area where there may be dozens of different spoken languages and where a purely phonetic representation would actually be limiting.
I’m wondering whether that also applies to Braille, Morse Code, and American Sign Language?
Yes, and I’m also wondering whether it applies to Quipu, for example. So one of my good friends is one of the world’s leading experts on Quipu, which is a largely non-phonetic but extraordinarily sophisticated information system that uses dimensions that we don’t, such as texture, such as haptic information. And when you look at these, you start realizing that definitions can wait until we’ve overturned the old traditions that insulted and dismissed these systems. So Quipu convey information in at least half a dozen different dimensions that we don’t even consider, and, as such, they are absolutely worth our consideration. And in many ways, those dimensions are making their way into our understanding of writing.
So, for example, if we consider something really high tech and modern, like heads-up displays for helicopter pilots who are flying at high speed low to the ground, they need information on their heads-up display in a way that fits their needs. They have to have only what they need at a given time. They have to have information they can take in, especially the most important things, at great speed. Because, obviously, if the ground is coming up and you’re only at fifty feet, you need that information quickly, right? But equally, you need that information given in such a way that it doesn’t alarm the pilot into some kind of jerky reaction. Consequently, things like color and spatial relationships and sound are now regarded as being crucial parts of, to stretch the word, writing. If you’re going to put writing up on their heads-up display, you’ve got to think beyond the conventional terms.
I have an analogy, which is that if you go back to, say, 1898 in either America or Britain—actually in other countries as well, but those two will do—and you say: “What is music?”, then what you find is that the most popular music in both those countries at the time is marching band music: it was enormously popular, and there would be bandstand parades, and you can still see the bandstands one hundred years later, and the repertoire is something that is still familiar to us today. But if you had asked “what is music?” then, you would have said, “Well, it’s primarily in two-four. Occasionally, there might be a military march in three-four. This is what we expect of the instrumentation. This is what we expect of the rhythm. This is what we expect of modulations and cadences. This is how it’s supposed to begin. This is how it’s supposed to end.” And since then, our understanding of music has become steadily more inclusive, thanks to world music, thanks to the use of sound effects, thanks to the use of synthesizers. So, consequently, when we look at music today and somebody plays Japanese gamelan music, we say, “Yes, that’s music, right?” The definition of writing is still several decades out of date.
And I am sort of in the process of trying to encourage people to elasticize it, not necessarily to say, “I have the answer,” because anybody who says that is A) arrogant and B) sooner or later bound to be wrong. But there are so many more dimensions that are worth considering that we would be fools not to consider them.
Can I give you another example? I have a carving I did, which is a detail from a nineteenth-century Javanese manuscript currently in the British Museum. And so, as you’d expect, there is some Javanese writing on it, but in the middle of the detail that I’ve chosen is a mermaid. Now, when we look at that, and probably when, you know, the first curators or collectors who saw this looked at that, unless they really knew that culture, they would have assumed that the writing was writing and the mermaid was some kind of illustration, either a whimsical illustration that had nothing to do with the text, or an illustration of something that was in the text. Or maybe that it was an elaboration on an initial capital, or something of those traditions, because that’s very much the Western approach. I have a talk that is called “Consider the Mermaid” that’s all based around this. So it turns out that, first of all, epic Javanese poetry, which is long—some of the longest epics in the world—was not read from a page; it was sung.
And so to look at the writing and to make the assumption that these are words on a page, the purpose of the page is to hold the words and for us to see the page and to read the words—those assumptions are completely wrong. The circumstances in which it was sung, I’ll come back to in a minute. These epics were long, and because the Javanese are no fools, they realized that an epic is really composed of sections. You know, the Homeric epics are sectional as well, right? And so what they did, as a tradition, was to sing these in different tempi or meters, so that there would be a sense of starting again. And now we’ve moved into this different key and this different rhythm, and now we’re moving on to this part of the epic, which is the tale of so and so and so and so, right?
So, again, writing is already being redefined when we think of it as a performance, as opposed to something to be read. Because this was going to be sung, and because it’s very long, like a heads-up display, the singer needed to know about these changes of tempo. Each section we would call a canto. And so they invented canto markers, and canto markers are called padia or muka padia. They were small paintings that were inserted into the text. Let’s say the painting was a marigold: the initial sound of marigold would rhyme with the tempo that the next section was to be sung in. So it’s actually completely unlike anything we have in our writing whatsoever, except maybe the Italian terms that you see in sheet music: Largo, Allegretto, etc. So the mermaid actually is a sign that the next section should be sung in a particular tempo whose name I can’t remember. So, straightaway, all of this is showing dimensions of the relationship between the observer and the text that are way beyond anything that we know.
But it goes further, because these performances—I believe the term is secaha pesantian, which you can read about in Writing Beyond Writing—were not like the solitary thing of a person with a book. They were performances that involved the entire village. And what would happen is that two or sometimes three people would train for weeks ahead of time before the secanta santia, and one of them would be training, rehearsing to sing the whole thing in old Javanese, which is the language that it was almost certainly written in. But they knew that old Javanese and contemporary Javanese had differences, and so somebody else would be there to kind of translate into the modern language. So it’s almost as if you’re doing a recitation of Beowulf, and someone is kind of going: “Icicles, Sword,” you know, that kind of thing. And then the third person would be there to kind of add commentary.
This is a sign that no matter what happens at Heorot, Beowulf and his people are doomed because the Swedes are going to seek revenge, etcetera . . . So it’s this complete performance, but the audience would join in. It was kind of like literary karaoke. So during the passages that people knew, they would stand up, and they would recite them with the performance. So what we have then is writing, but writing in a way that is musical, is performative and is interactive and is communal, and would go on for hours. And instead of being like a book, which has the capacity to be socially fragmenting—people go off and read on their own—this is something where the purpose of writing is actually to be not only cohesive in that the whole village takes part in it right now, but to have a cohesion over time, in that it’s connecting these people to their traditions and their past and they’re hearing old Javanese, even if they don’t know it particularly well. So it’s an infinitely more inclusive and multi-dimensional experience than what we call writing.
You have written about what I guess can be called constructed scripts, and I’m wondering whether there is a correlation between constructed scripts and constructed languages such as Esperanto, Volapūk, Interlingua, etc.
There are. There are three categories we need to consider here, and they’re very, very different. It is extremely rare for anybody to create a language that is intended to be used by their immediate community for everyday purposes. It has happened, but it has happened typically in Southeast Asia, typically as part of a massive social movement that was usually also a movement intending to overthrow an oppressor. So there are a number of instances where you have a charismatic leader who invents a language and a script and a religion and becomes a military leader, and people cohere around them. Around him. It’s always a guy, because he promises that he will overthrow the French, you know, or the English, or whoever is oppressing them. Constructed languages, beyond that, tend to be much more theoretical, and they hope for a speaker community, rather than have an existing speaker community, Esperanto being an obvious example. Constructed scripts fall into two categories which are completely different, and there are really interesting things about both of them.
First of all, over the last fifteen years I have been studying what I very loosely called endangered alphabets, and I really should be calling them endangered or emerging minority writing systems, or something like that. And what I found is that I’m the first person to identify every script currently in use in the world. Now, I should add that this is already a moving target, and new scripts are actually being discovered or created all the time. But about four years ago, I started work on a thing called the Red List. You may know about the Red List of endangered species, which was the heart of the endangered species movement in the sixties. So this is the Red List of endangered and emerging scripts. And the Red List says that there are over three hundred. It’s impossible to know whether some of them are still in use. It’s impossible to know where the new ones are being dug up. But for the purposes of your question, the fascinating thing is that of that three hundred plus, half of them have been created by an individual or small group de novo. And so every time I see one of those kinds of family trees of the world’s writing systems, I’m struck by the fact that they ignore half of the scripts that are in use in the world and the reasons for creating a script.
As I say, we’re talking about two different categories here right now. I’m talking about an individual who is creating a script in the hope that it will be used by their immediate ethno-linguistic community. So we’re talking about the Barry brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye, at the age of, I think, eleven and thirteen, inventing the Adlam script. We’re talking about Shong Lue Yang inventing Pahawh Hmong. These are people who are doing it for a social purpose: either their own language is being written in a colonial script that doesn’t really suit its phonetic varieties, such as Arabic and some of the languages in the Arabic-speaking regions of West Africa; or, in the case of Shong Lue Yang, where you have a people that don’t have a script at all, and they are regarded as being primitive and backward because they don’t, which is an extremely common attitude, especially in Asia, Southeast Asia in particular. So bringing respect and literacy really go hand in hand in the indigenous creation of scripts for ethno-linguistic communities.
You also have, at the same time, the creation of conscripts for novels and movies. Obviously, we’re talking about, originally, someone like Tolkien. Nowadays, everybody is doing it. And I draw a distinction between these two, because these are not intended for the creator’s ethno-linguistic community. They’re intended for artistic effect or fun, which isn’t to say that people don’t go to extraordinary lengths to create them, but it’s a different purpose. But there is a point of overlap, which is that over the last twenty years, especially the last ten years, the tools that are available for script creation, especially digital tools that are available for script creation and dissemination, are now so much more readily available that if you go back to, let’s say, Nolence Mwangwego, creating the Mwangwego script in central southern Africa. He’s in the position where he has to teach it with a blackboard and a piece of chalk. And he’s very vulnerable to isolation, to other members of his community calling him a crackpot.
The people who are creating scripts today for their community are much more likely to have a wider set of skills. They will have the linguistic skills necessary to be able to sort out all the phonemes they need, and they will have the coding skills and the graphic design skills necessary to say: “OK, we’ll take that sign and we’ll sketch it up on CorelDRAW,” or something along those lines, and then, quite likely, the skills necessary to put together a YouTube video. So the sad days of scripts limping along with just devoted, often solitary creator-teachers, teaching them with a chart or a blackboard, are mostly past. Those are still going on, but the scripts that are being created now are much more likely to be backed up by all of these digital tools, and therefore much more likely to be successfully adopted.
Why do you claim that the pencil is a more important invention than the printing press?
Well, of course, as you’ve already realized, a lot of what I say is intended to make people think. By temperament, I’m an essayist. And an essayist is always only half a step away from being an asshole. The great thing about being an essayist is that your job is just to turn up, suggest something, and then leave, and people can then chew on it, and you’re already out of the building. So the pencil being more important than the printing press—the context in which I said that was that I was writing about this formal/informal contest that started early in 1999 where various people asked, “What was the most important invention of the last millennium?” I think I said in the book that the Wall Street Journal was the first one that I found that weighed in. And they named the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, which, of course, is a joke, because it had already been invented, you know, several hundred years earlier in China. So clearly this was something that was really more about what people’s beliefs and favorites are. It’s like when Rolling Stone does “100 Greatest Guitarists.” You could always name one hundred far greater guitarists that nobody’s ever heard of. So it’s a popularity contest. In that sense, I said I thought it should be the pencil because I wanted to draw attention to the fact that, first of all, the printing press changed writing in ways that we no longer recognize because we actually take them for granted as fundamental elements of writing, whereas, in fact, they’re elements of printing.
The printing press changed the way we use writing, the way we see writing, the way we consume writing. And it also changed the very shapes of the letters of writing. It changed the relationship between writing and art. In fact, until the printing press, it was not unusual for the same person to do the writing and the illustration in a manuscript. Not always, by any means. There were specialists, but it wasn’t unusual. As soon as you have printing, you actually have a section which needs to be typeset, and then a section which needs to be a block. So those are done by two entirely different people using different processes in different places. And so the distinction between writing and art starts to emerge.
The thing that I love about the pencil is that the pencil works in the way that we think. People would love to believe that we think either in these kinds of eureka-like leaps of brilliance, or that we think logically and sequentially. And both of them are immensely flattering to the human race and completely untrue. The fact is that we think iteratively; we are constantly producing, so to speak, hypotheses, or the best idea we have at that particular instant, and then changing it, and then modifying it, and then drafting it. Actually, in the book I’m writing right now, which is called By Hand, I’m really interested in the process by which the very act of watching what we write provokes the act of thinking about what it is we’re saying as we’re saying it. So we think of writing as a means of displaying our thinking for other people, which it is.
But in the first instance, it’s a way of displaying our thinking to ourselves, and therefore setting up that kind of iterative response that Richard Feynman, the physicist, for example, showed during an interview, with a piece of paper with some of his calculations on it. The interviewer said, “OK, so this is a record of your thinking.” And he said, “No, this is the thinking. The paper is the thinking.” And it becomes a process that is actually so fast and so instinctive that towards the end of this book that I’m writing by hand (I realize that we’re a little off subject now, but we’ll get there). I dictate into my phone—which I do when I’m driving, possibly illegally—then when I have an idea, and I think, “I mustn’t forget that, I’m going to dictate it in my phone.” When I’m dictating, I’m going “um” and “ah” a lot, and I’m saying words in little gushes, little stutters. If I’m writing in my journal, my hand doesn’t stop. And I thought, well, that is curious, because you would think that your mind is working so much faster than your hand that your hand would be just desperate to keep up with it, and I realized that what was happening was that, all at the same time, I would have an idea that translated itself into words, and I would start writing those words, but even as I was forming the words, I would be modifying it and rewording it and synchronizing the new wording with my hand. And I thought, nobody thinks about writing like that. There’s very little study of the act of writing. There’s a lot of cognitive stuff that is like what is happening in the brain when you write, but there’s almost nothing about what is happening during the act of writing. And to come back to your issue about the pencil: the pencil allows us to think the way thinking happens.
So there is an ideogram that I created out of a long story. I knew what I wanted it to look like, and so I got a pencil, and I got this piece of wood, and essentially I started sketching. And what sketching does is create a series of hypotheses, which, if you like them, you then resolve into something more solid. And often you don’t know exactly what you want it to look like when you start. And those are the mechanics of writing and the sheer action of the wrist and the hand—and the fact that there are certain motions which are much easier—loops are great ones, for example—come into play. So I sketched this over and over again by hand, and got to the point where I thought, “Those are the proportions and the dimensions I like. It has the flow that I like, because the notion of flow is really built into the motion of the hand, and what comes naturally to the hand. And now what I’m going to do is I’m just going to go over it more firmly, to solidify it into the thing that I like.”
The printing press doesn’t do that. The printing press is stupid. It simply says, “Tell me what to do. Put the letters in even if they’re upside down.” My grandfather had a printing press, and I’ll bang it out for you. What the pencil does is it forces you to be more intelligent, because it offers you a series of options, and you have to think about them, and the fact that it is erasable means that you allow yourself the opportunity to think, to explore, to make a series of creative decisions that take you way beyond where you started, whereas a printing press, or a computer for that matter . . . as soon as you engage with it, your thinking stops.
So I take it that you are uncomfortable with the fact that many schools have ceased to teach cursive writing.
You are anticipating my book By Hand. That’s one of the starting points of the book. What I did was decide I was going to write that book by hand. Originally, I was actually going to write it by hand and then scan it and publish it in my handwriting. There were, in the end, just too many problems with that. But I have written the book by hand, and in fact, there’s one chunk of about a page where I went to the café where I do my writing, and I had my moleskin with me, and I was all ready with some ideas in my head. But I realized I had left my calligraphy pen, which I love, at home. And I was really annoyed as I got my laptop out, and I sort of typed up what I’d been thinking. When I got to the end, I thought, “It feels so stiff, so unnatural.” And I thought, “Do I have the chutzpah to go back and do it again, by and?” Because, as a writer, you know the worst thing in the world is to write something again. So I thought, “No, I’m not going to do that.” And then I went home, and it just bugged me, because it was my writing, but it wasn’t my best writing by any means. And I thought, “I'm going to do it again by hand.” So I got my moleskin out and I started from the same spot and wrote by hand. And the feel is completely different. There’s so much more passion. There is so much more engagement in the subject. If you look at it, you can see how excited I am by what I’m writing. Simply by my handwriting: my handwriting is galloping. I make connections that I had never thought of making when I was just typing the stuff out.
And so the book winds up being not only about the question you ask about cursive and the value of handwriting. It is also about the value of keeping a journal, because there is actually a phenomenal amount of research, which is quite astounding, about the benefits, not only psychological but physiological benefits, of keeping a journal. I mean, we’re talking about things like rate of recovery from major surgery. What you would think of as being hardcore physiological stuff, well tested, well demonstrated, that change if you are keeping a journal about the experience. The book has a twist at the end, which I’m not going to tell you about, but you can tell people it has a twist at the end.
As you probably know, a number of journal keepers throughout history have devised codes to keep their journals secret. Samuel Pepys, for example, wrote backward so that it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that scholars were able to decipher what he wrote. By contrast, Leo and Sophia Tolstoy each kept a very candid diary that they exchanged with each other every evening, inflaming marital discord.
I love that. Well, I certainly show my partner what I’m writing, and she rarely says anything nasty, but she’ll certainly let me know if I’m not at my best.
Let me ask you something quite different. I was struck by your chapter in Writing Beyond Writing on the relationship between mystic rituals and scripts. I wonder whether you have a theory about the infamous Voynich Manuscript.
Oh, absolutely. There’s probably a really, really good term for this, but I don’t know what it is. I think it’s bogus. I like the theory that it was developed by John Dee’s associate, Edward Kelley. I like the idea that it was created by somebody, if not Kelley, then somebody like him, as a means of demonstrating how supernaturally connected he was, how he was hermetic in the deepest sense. I’ve seen quite a few bits of it, and a friend of mine is actually one of the librarians in the Beinecke. It certainly seems as though it is essentially not just a con, but a kind of résumé, though it’s hard to know. In the film industry, you show people you’re real when you have a reel. Nowadays, it isn’t an actual reel, but if you’re up for a job, you have a reel where you’ve taken bits of all your best work, and you’re doing it because you’re hoping to land a better role than you have been getting until then. I think this is the equivalent. This is somebody who wants to show how, you know, he is the natural successor to the great Hermes Trismegistus, and he is the Cornelius Agrippa of his day. And I think the fact that there are so many women in baths—it’s sort of like you’ve run out of imagination. If you were really connected with the angels, they would be giving you better material.
OK, fair enough. Of all the scripts that you have studied, do you have a favorite?
I have many favorites for different reasons. The one that is my favorite at the moment is my favorite for a very particular reason. When I set myself to write this book, By Hand, by hand, at the beginning, my handwriting was awful. It used to be OK back when, you know, I used it all the time for everything, but since becoming a writer, I do everything on a computer; your hand becomes just the thing you scribble notes with. So the handwriting becomes terrible. In any book, I always try to do several things, but one of my aims in this book is to see whether I can literally just become a better writer—whether my writing can improve. But the idea, my belief, my hypothesis, was that that was actually connected to my hand, kind of like in Zen archery. In Zen archery, if you are in that moment, and you and the bow and the target are one, you don’t even need to think. I had this theory that if I could get to a certain kind of mental and spiritual state and ignore all of the ten thousand distractions that are usually running through my mind, then my handwriting would start to take care of itself, and the act of writing like that, in turn, would have its effect on me. So when I’m carving, for example, it’s a very calming activity. It’s a form of meditation as I’m doing it. And as I got toward the end, because I’m pretty much finished, I had reached this point where I was no longer trying to dash across the page. I was starting to respect each word, and I was starting to write each word as a unit in itself.
The Mongolian script is, I believe, unique in the world, in that every letter has three versions: an initial, a medial and a final. So, for example, the letter T or TA will have an initial version, which involves a kind of a swoop down, so that each word begins with a kind of fanfare. The medial version is much, much simpler. It may be just a single line or like a little notch coming out, because each word has a spine, a vertical spine. So it may just have a little thing coming out from the spine. But the final version is the most elaborate of all. And so it goes like this, or it goes like that. And so it’s the only script in the world that I know of that is inherently calligraphic. It actually makes you think about how you write each word.
And I was realizing that, if I were writing a B as an initial B, it would be like this. There would be a little extra bit—it doesn’t need to go out that far. If I were writing a B in the middle of the word, it would likely be much more simple. And then, obviously, there are certain letters in the Latin alphabet that you can’t do much with at all, unless you’re like an Elizabethan person signing their signature. But it also meant that if the last letter, for example, were a Y, then you had the opportunity to end the letter with a kind of flourish. So I think the Mongols have really cracked the art of writing by designing a script that is actually meant to be written with élan, as the French would say.
I’d love to go on and on. However, we have to submit to the tyranny of print. And time. I want to thank you very much for sharing your time and your thoughts and your work.
