A writer confronted by Xu Bing's "Book from the Sky"

The artist Xu Bing is perhaps most famous for his massive work, Book From the Sky.  To create this work, Xu Bing invented several thousand Chinese characters, characters that do not, otherwise, exist, and therefore have no meaning.  He created this work of art by carving these newly created characters on woodblocks and printing massive scrolls and 100 bound books composed entirely of his new characters.  There is no meaning to the characters, despite the massiveness of the literary project.

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Book of the Sky

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Words patter like rain on the impenetrable surface of a book that speaks of nothing but itself, in a language that no one can understand.

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“…Art cannot be interpreted through language.  If art could be interpreted through language, there would not be any reason for the existence of art.” Xu Bing, creator of “Book From the Sky”

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How to respond to a massive work of art, a manifesto, that denies the inherent meaning of the written word?  To attempt to write something, anything, in the face of this work seems redundant, irrelevant, foolhardy.  But if words are your primary medium of artistic expression in work that strives to express the meaning beyond language lurking at the margins before a sentence begins or after it ends, the meaning which leaks out in fissures between words allowing some lighter substance to appear that does not always obey the commands of a linear and dualistic way of thinking, the attempt must be made. [endif]

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Standing over the stove book in hand,

Oblivious to the smell of burning garlic and onions

Hunger for food, yes, but more so

Hunger for experience

Orchestrated by an author worthy of Borges’

Library of Babel,

Of books filled with harbingers of meaning

That express nothing

But themselves

Words glowing in their very”thing-ness”

Majestically marching across the blank, white page

Keeping up the steady beat of tradition, history

And custom

As orderly as the First Emperor’s terracotta army

But all the while serving no master

But confusion

Confounding

Us with their clarity

Taunting us by stubbornly withholding meaning

Language finally breaking free of its enslavement

Oblivious to its creator

A thing of beauty in its perfection

No longer of this earth

Except in its use of men to give it physical form and substance

Which the sperm

Which the egg

That created this life?

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