It’s me, Steve. Not a funny character, just me. I guess this could be a flashback, to the moment I was writing all of this. Back a few months–where is the backspace button?–white out!–there we go–weeks ago. I was sitting down trying to imagine what a future me would say to an audience I could only guess would be at the tables where you are now. So, the dialogue in my head was between people who didn’t really exist at that moment.
(pulls out paper. gets up) Phew.
(reads from the paper) It’s a strange thing–words, or rather writing. They are simultaneously anchored in the past and waiting to be unlocked and spoken or read at some future time. And then, once read, they recoil and prepare to spring forth again. I’ll say these words again at another time, and they will carry with them the history of being written at one point and spoken at another.
I guess that’s why I’m attracted to writing–that push and pull of past and future.
The Russian philosopher Mikail Bakhtin wrote that half the word in language is someone else’s. Every utterance has the traces of utterance already spoken and will pre-echo the utterance yet to come. Everything we say is enmeshed in the past and the future without us really knowing it.
I wonder what the people who first started to write were thinking. There’s some debate about when the first system of writing emerged, but I guess I’m on team cuneiform, mostly because I like Irving Finkel; you should look him up on YouTube–-he is a riot.
Starting around the end of the fourth millennium B.C. in ancient Babylonia, the marks used to tabulate sales started to morph into words. Counting grain turned into a symbol for grain, which turned into a word for grain, and eventually a story about grain.
(pulls out clay tablet and stylus at starts to make marks)
Can you imagine what the bookkeeper who used a wedge on a clay tablet to keep track of livestock and grain would think about what writing looks like today? One famous example of cuneiform is called the Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir, the title of which gives a lot away. It is in the Guiness Book of World Records for being the oldest complaint letter. It is a small 2 by 5 inch note complaining about the quality of copper ore that was delivered. It’s from around 1750 BCE (before Common Era)–3,775 years ago. It has been translated in part as the following; “What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt!”
The tablet has a surprisingly modern sense of urgency and outrage. It is interesting to think that there was something different about sending this tablet with this message rather than just sending the messenger himself. What must it have been like to get one one of the first clay tablets with this chicken scratch on it. This wasn’t just some messenger retelling what the original speaker said. These were the exact words that came to life when they were read.
We don’t know if he got his refund or not, but the thing that sticks with me is that the writer pressing a stylus into a piece of clay created something that has lasted over 3000 years and will probably outlast most things we write today.
We write a lot these days. Most of it is probably closer to the Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir than say the Epic of Gilgamesh, but we put a lot of words down in email, texts, social media posts, grocery lists, and ChatGPT prompts. These can stick around long enough to ruin your life, but not much beyond that. There is this thing called digital rot where the 1s and 0s of our digital files can start to degrade overtime or the technology that is needed to decode these 1s and 0s is no longer around. Betamax tapes, anyone?
Despite all of this writing, there is a sense that kids these days can’t string together two coherent sentences. I’ll let you in on a little secret. As long as there has been writing, there has been someone saying, “kids these days can’t write.” Socrates said that writing would make all of the students only have the appearance of wisdom and not really be wise. King Alfred of England in the 800s complained that there wasn’t anyone around anymore who could write in English let alone translate from Latin.The faculty of Harvard at the end of the 19th century complained of their students’ “bad spelling, confusing punctuation, ungrammatical, obscure, ambiguous, or inelegant expressions.” Even after adding Freshman composition, one committee argued that the most noticeable feature of papers written in English A was their “extreme crudeness both of thought and execution.” It seems like it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a child possessing a good future be in want of a writing instruction.
So I can imagine that there were Assyrians complaining that nobody knew how to hold a stylus correctly anymore and schoolmasters of Elizabethan England lamenting that it has all been downhill since Chaucer. Of course, it is different today where kids these days can’t write their way out of a wet paper bag.
But I think there is hope. I think the more we can put words on the page, the more we can create, the more we can etch thoughts onto a surface that can slumber gently until they awaken with the magic of the reader–the more we can do all of that, the more we can build connection. Not just a connection between the immediate reader and writer, but also between all of the readers and writers out there. For as Bakhtin said, half of the word in language is someone else’s.”
When Gutenberg created his moveable type and his printing press–I won’t say “invented” because other people had figured it out before he came along–writing changed. Not just in that people could quickly create multiple copies of the same thing relatively quickly. That was important. But also letters became things. You could now say, I dropped a K on the floor or I put the E in the wrong case. I have to imagine that this was a radical shift in the ways that writers saw their work. They were now rearranging letters into words into sentences and paragraphs–not just fixing their thoughts onto the page.
Of course, this has changed again. Now most of our writing isn’t much more than 1s and 0s–some sort of code that most of us don’t understand but we can see the output, which flickers on the screen in front of us. We can share this writing at incredible speeds and incredible distance.
Writing is like the mycorrhizal networks–the underground fungal networks that supposedly connect trees in the forest. We are connected to the past through writing. We are connected to the future through writing. We don’t need to understand it to know that it is happening. Every time we put pen to paper we are connected to the ancient cuneiform writer demanding respect.
Now comes the interactive part of the evening. You didn’t think you’d be able to just sit back and be passive this whole time. Good god, I was a teacher for several years. We always try to make people do some of the work. Something about engaged learning.
On the table in front of you is a small blank card. I want you to write a short note to the future you–it could be the future you at the end of the show, it could be the future you tomorrow morning, or next month or in 1,330-some odd days. Write about a hope that you have, a fleeting thought that might spark a memory in the future. Through a small flick of your pen create something new. If you get stuck, just send yourself a kind message. Anchor your thoughts now that will be uncoiled when you open that note at a future time. If you want, share that thought with the rest of the folks at your table. We’ll give you a couple of minutes to write. While you are doing that, I’ll switch over the set and get your dessert ready.