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Words to the wise
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Words to the wise
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Celebrating the wonder of writing leaves room for doubt about its future, finds Simon Ings
Writing: Making your mark British Library, London to 27 August
WRITING is dark magic. Because the written (or carved) word effortlessly outlives the human span, it lets the dead make constant demands. The ancient Egyptians used to channel the divine power of words into spells to animate carved servants called shabti to do their bidding after death. At a new exhibition at London’s British Library, the inscription on one put-upon shabti reads: “Here I am”, ready “when called to work, cultivate fields or irrigate the riverbanks”. As Writing: Making your mark shows: poetry be damned, writing is all about control. In the dialogue Phaedrus, composed around 370 BC, the philosopher Socrates complains that writing things down will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they
will not use their memories… they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing”. Our current worries over trust, authority, truth and fake news feed Socrates’s suspicion that the written word makes us shallow, and less than we might be: a society earnestly conversing with itself. The exhibition does its best to win us over with its celebration of a technology that’s a bit under five millennia old. Here you will find everything from carved slabs to the first use of an italic typeface (pictured). It is thoughtful and eye-catching. Best of all, the show makes narrative sense: we learn how writing and printing evolved independently at different times and places, to fulfil changing social and cultural functions. But in the final room, on the future of writing, the curators may have woken up to doubt – about new media undercutting our written culture. I am surprised. After all, written and printed forms are proliferating. Emoji have given us a whole new writing system to combine with our current languages. Instagram, once full of unadorned selfies, sparkles with photos smothered in animated annotations and one-liners in a form so new it hasn’t really got a name yet. Writing remains one of our most plastic forms of selfexpression. How strange that a show that does such a great job of bringing past writing to life, from Roman shorthand to James Joyce’s multicoloured notebook maunderings, should stumble at this present-day hurdle. ❚ Italics first appeared in print in 1501, in this pocket edition of Virgil’s poetry
Exponential View is Azeem Azhar's podcast about how the more speculative sides of technology will affect our society. Guests include luminaries from the worlds of business, politics and academia. Play
Road to Guangdong explores the tension between old and new in 1990s China, through the prism of a family road trip in a clapped out car. This enchanting journey is available on PC from 16 May. Visit
Food: Bigger than the plate at London’s V&A probes the future of food from farm to fork (or from hydroponic pod to wrapper). Over 70 projects are featured, alongside objects from the collection. From 18 May.
11 May 2019 | New Scientist | 31
FROM BOTTOM: CAROLIEN NIEBLING,THE SAUSAGE OF THE FUTURE PHOTO NOORTJE KNULST, EXCALIBUR GAMES, THOMAS TRUTSCHEL/ PHOTOTHEK/ FALLING WALLS.
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist
Exhibition
© BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD
future, we were ruled by moral imperatives built on deep memory that instilled obligations about long-term stewardship of our environment. We were good ancestors – or at least as good as we could be in the circumstances. But now that we have the tools to see backwards and to project the future, we seem hell-bent on ignoring the lessons they offer. Even someone with Macfarlane’s powers can’t disentangle this paradox. Perhaps as a result, his second contention, that by exploring ideas about underland we can uncover the human heart, is made less persuasive. Here, his explorations sometimes descend into empty metaphor. Even when they are accompanied by the fictional journeys of fellow underland writers from Jules Verne and Lewis Carroll to Virgil, “digging deep” can appear shallow. And some may find Macfarlane’s lyricism irritating. If you bristle at his early gambits that “darkness might be a medium of vision”, and that his descent into the bowels of the Earth “may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation”, you could be among them. But when embarking on any long journey, you need to know that you will enjoy the company of your companion as well as the itinerary. And here you will be travelling with a considerable polymath, as willing and able to quote a Nature paper as Edgar Allan Poe, and to discuss the finer techniques of caving as surely as the physics of dark matter. The bottom line is that if you enjoy Macfarlane’s style and intellect, as I do, you will enjoy the long journey into the underland. ❚
Words to the wise
Listen
Celebrating the wonder of writing leaves room for doubt about its future, finds Simon Ings
Writing: Making your mark British Library, London to 27 August
WRITING is dark magic. Because the written (or carved) word effortlessly outlives the human span, it lets the dead make constant demands. The ancient Egyptians used to channel the divine power of words into spells to animate carved servants called shabti to do their bidding after death. At a new exhibition at London’s British Library, the inscription on one put-upon shabti reads: “Here I am”, ready “when called to work, cultivate fields or irrigate the riverbanks”. As Writing: Making your mark shows: poetry be damned, writing is all about control. In the dialogue Phaedrus, composed around 370 BC, the philosopher Socrates complains that writing things down will “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they
will not use their memories… they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing”. Our current worries over trust, authority, truth and fake news feed Socrates’s suspicion that the written word makes us shallow, and less than we might be: a society earnestly conversing with itself. The exhibition does its best to win us over with its celebration of a technology that’s a bit under five millennia old. Here you will find everything from carved slabs to the first use of an italic typeface (pictured). It is thoughtful and eye-catching. Best of all, the show makes narrative sense: we learn how writing and printing evolved independently at different times and places, to fulfil changing social and cultural functions. But in the final room, on the future of writing, the curators may have woken up to doubt – about new media undercutting our written culture. I am surprised. After all, written and printed forms are proliferating. Emoji have given us a whole new writing system to combine with our current languages. Instagram, once full of unadorned selfies, sparkles with photos smothered in animated annotations and one-liners in a form so new it hasn’t really got a name yet. Writing remains one of our most plastic forms of selfexpression. How strange that a show that does such a great job of bringing past writing to life, from Roman shorthand to James Joyce’s multicoloured notebook maunderings, should stumble at this present-day hurdle. ❚ Italics first appeared in print in 1501, in this pocket edition of Virgil’s poetry
Exponential View is Azeem Azhar's podcast about how the more speculative sides of technology will affect our society. Guests include luminaries from the worlds of business, politics and academia. Play
Road to Guangdong explores the tension between old and new in 1990s China, through the prism of a family road trip in a clapped out car. This enchanting journey is available on PC from 16 May. Visit
Food: Bigger than the plate at London’s V&A probes the future of food from farm to fork (or from hydroponic pod to wrapper). Over 70 projects are featured, alongside objects from the collection. From 18 May.
11 May 2019 | New Scientist | 31
FROM BOTTOM: CAROLIEN NIEBLING,THE SAUSAGE OF THE FUTURE PHOTO NOORTJE KNULST, EXCALIBUR GAMES, THOMAS TRUTSCHEL/ PHOTOTHEK/ FALLING WALLS.
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist
Exhibition
© BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD
future, we were ruled by moral imperatives built on deep memory that instilled obligations about long-term stewardship of our environment. We were good ancestors – or at least as good as we could be in the circumstances. But now that we have the tools to see backwards and to project the future, we seem hell-bent on ignoring the lessons they offer. Even someone with Macfarlane’s powers can’t disentangle this paradox. Perhaps as a result, his second contention, that by exploring ideas about underland we can uncover the human heart, is made less persuasive. Here, his explorations sometimes descend into empty metaphor. Even when they are accompanied by the fictional journeys of fellow underland writers from Jules Verne and Lewis Carroll to Virgil, “digging deep” can appear shallow. And some may find Macfarlane’s lyricism irritating. If you bristle at his early gambits that “darkness might be a medium of vision”, and that his descent into the bowels of the Earth “may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation”, you could be among them. But when embarking on any long journey, you need to know that you will enjoy the company of your companion as well as the itinerary. And here you will be travelling with a considerable polymath, as willing and able to quote a Nature paper as Edgar Allan Poe, and to discuss the finer techniques of caving as surely as the physics of dark matter. The bottom line is that if you enjoy Macfarlane’s style and intellect, as I do, you will enjoy the long journey into the underland. ❚