Thursday, April 23, 2020
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Monday, April 20, 2020
Sunday, April 19, 2020
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Writs and The Readable
Daoist Writs
Pattern
A Note from Cece Chapman: Roland Barthes: Empire of Signs
Cece Chapman says, "came across this in my ongoing search for signs, symbol, image info...".
What Cece Chapman found was a truly seminal work in asemics in Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes.
Here is a sample from Barthes:
The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it
without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or
vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the
systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own "reality" under the effect of other formulations, other
syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject's
topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it,
until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the "father tongue"--vacillate that tongue which
comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers[--]and proprietors of a culture which,
precisely, history transforms into "nature."
Friday, April 17, 2020
Asemic Writing on the Way to Textual Practices in Daoism
Textual practices in Daoism are, perhaps, the other side of asemic writing. The graphical texts of Daoism often constitute talismans, a text readable by divinities, but perhaps not readily readable by mortals. Indeed, this architext requires performance to make it comprehensible to those illiterate in the divine ways of reading, i.e. to make it realizable as text. Asemic writing, though post-literate and largely areligious, shares much in common with this practice.
The Cult of Spirit-Writing in the Qing: The Daoist Dimension
(The Cult of Spirit-Writing in the Qing: The Daoist Dimension by Lai Chi-Tim)
The Function of Writing in Daoism
(The Function of Writing in Daoism by Fabrizio Pregadio)
The highest gods reveal texts, teachings, and methods either directly or through their representatives. For instance, the Shangqing and Lingbao scriptures are deemed to have taken shape from self-generated graphs coagulated from Original Breath (Robinet 1993: 21–24), or from sounds generated by its vibration (Bokenkamp 1997: 386–87), in the early stages of the formation of the cosmos. They were transmitted in Heaven until a “divine being” or an “immortal” transcribed them into characters understandable to humans.
Just like the gods usually grant revelations in the form of scriptures, the typically Daoist form of communicating with the gods is by writing: as Anna Seidel remarked, the Chinese deities “neither speak nor listen, but write and read” (1997: 43). In Daoist ritual, the priest delivers a “memorial” (or “statement”, shu) to the gods in order to announce the ceremony performed in their honor, declare its purpose, specify its program, and list the names of those who sponsor it (Schipper 1974). The so-called talismans (fu, a word almost exactly corresponding to the original meaning of Greek symbolon) are traced on paper or other supports in graphs hardly comprehensible to humans but intelligible to the gods (Despeux 2000; Mollier 2003). Like the revealed scriptures—some of which, in fact, are deemed to have evolved from them—talismans have counterparts in Heaven, and thus serve to identify and authenticate their possessors in front of the gods. They confer the power to summon certain deities and to control demons, but also protect space and heal illnesses; they are worn on one’s body, affixed at the four directions, placed along the path that leads to one’s dwelling, or made into ashes and drunk with water.
The highest gods reveal texts, teachings, and methods either directly or through their representatives. For instance, the Shangqing and Lingbao scriptures are deemed to have taken shape from self-generated graphs coagulated from Original Breath (Robinet 1993: 21–24), or from sounds generated by its vibration (Bokenkamp 1997: 386–87), in the early stages of the formation of the cosmos. They were transmitted in Heaven until a “divine being” or an “immortal” transcribed them into characters understandable to humans.
Just like the gods usually grant revelations in the form of scriptures, the typically Daoist form of communicating with the gods is by writing: as Anna Seidel remarked, the Chinese deities “neither speak nor listen, but write and read” (1997: 43). In Daoist ritual, the priest delivers a “memorial” (or “statement”, shu) to the gods in order to announce the ceremony performed in their honor, declare its purpose, specify its program, and list the names of those who sponsor it (Schipper 1974). The so-called talismans (fu, a word almost exactly corresponding to the original meaning of Greek symbolon) are traced on paper or other supports in graphs hardly comprehensible to humans but intelligible to the gods (Despeux 2000; Mollier 2003). Like the revealed scriptures—some of which, in fact, are deemed to have evolved from them—talismans have counterparts in Heaven, and thus serve to identify and authenticate their possessors in front of the gods. They confer the power to summon certain deities and to control demons, but also protect space and heal illnesses; they are worn on one’s body, affixed at the four directions, placed along the path that leads to one’s dwelling, or made into ashes and drunk with water.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
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