Writing is dark magic. Because the written, or even better, carved, word can effortlessly outlive the human span, it enables the dead to lord it over the living.
There are advantages to this, of course. It鈥檚 handy not to have to reinvent the wheel generation after generation.
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But let鈥檚 be clear who wields the power here 鈥� much as the ancient Egyptians, who used to channel the divine power of words into spells that would animate carved servants, or shabti, ready to do their bidding after their death. 鈥淗ere I am,鈥� reads the inscription on one poor put-upon shabti, ready 鈥渨hen called to work, cultivate fields or irrigate the riverbanks.鈥�
Control, not poetry
Poetry be damned: writing is first and foremost about control.
This is very apparent in a new exhibition at the British Library, London, called Writing: Making your mark. It鈥檚 been launched to celebrate a technology that鈥檚 a bit under five millennia old, so you鈥檒l find everything from carved stone slabs to the first ever use of an italic typeface, to (my favourite) an eye-wateringly vituperative telegram (in four parts) from the 20th century British playwright John Osborne to a hostile critic.
It鈥檚 comprehensive, thoughtful and eye-catching, with a design that has you wandering through what looks like some peculiar 3D cuneiform from the future. Best of all, the show makes narrative sense: we learn how various writing and printing forms evolved independently at different times and places, to fulfil changing social and cultural functions.
Granted, the story does not and cannot start with much of a bang. As the wall information concedes, the act of writing is just a recreational by-product of accounting. The first written records were tallies, calendars and contracts. Set aside their great age and the earliest objects in the exhibition (among them the oldest in the Library鈥檚 collection, an Egyptian stela (carved stone) from around 1600 BC) make for dull reading.
Socrates and suspicion
But amazingly early, suspicion, and even downright hatred, of the written word crept in 鈥� to run like a secret history beneath the course of Western culture. In the dialogue Phaedrus, composed around 370 BC, the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates complains that writing things down will 鈥渃reate forgetfulness in the learners鈥� souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves鈥� they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing鈥�.
Plato, Socrates鈥� pupil, listened to his master鈥檚 diatribe intently. Indeed, he took down every word. Plato鈥檚 obtuse disobedience has paid huge dividends. For one thing, it means that Socrates鈥� wisdom is available to us all. Millennia hence, we are still reading Phaedrus, and smiling at the quaint bits.
But a few of us (we meet in dank basement rooms: check your pens and smartphones at the door) agree with Socrates. We reckon that putting pen (stylus, chisel or moveable type鈥�) to paper (stone, slate, clay, or peeled bark) has set the lot of us on the road to everlasting perdition.
Our current all-too-well founded panics around trust, authority, truth and fake news feed the gloomy suspicion that the written word makes us lazy and shallow, that for all our modern, information-driven wonders, our space rockets and our antibiotics, it makes us less than we might be: a people earnestly conversing with themselves.
Flawed futures
Writing: Making your mark does its best to win us round to the cause of literacy and preserved thought.
Who knew that the story of written forms would prove so epic? Or, indeed, so touching? There鈥檚 a sandstone sphinx sporting a prototype letter 鈥淎鈥�, and a Greek child鈥檚 second-century homework scratched, laboriously, on a clay tablet.
The final room, about the future of writing, is odd: a black box, and virtually empty, as though the plethora of new media had shaken the curators鈥� confidence.
I鈥檓 surprised the curators鈥� confidence should have been so shaken. After all, written and printed forms continue to proliferate: emoji have provided us with a whole new writing system to combine with our alphabetic language. Instagram, once the home of unadorned selfie snaps, now wobbles and sparkles with photos smothered in animated annotations and one-liners in a form that鈥檚 so new it hasn鈥檛 really got a name yet. Writing continues to be one of our most plastic and fast-changing forms of self-expression.
Though with each innovation, we retreat, chattering, ever further from Socrates鈥� dinner party ideal of society driven by good conversation.
听
, British Library,听to 27 August
