Mute Codex
RCA
Writing
2019
Mute Codex meanders through typographic space within the book page (ie. marginal, indents, word spaces etc) and considers the use of similes and metaphors as a way to describe something which is both functional and poetically abstract. Active ‘white space’ can be considered a foundational element of graphic design practice.
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Mute Codex
As John Cage knew, ‘try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.’ Pins drop and lips unbutton — there’s always something to hear. On the page and in the auditorium, silence performs through omission, and only those who regularly flex its opposite, (the musician, writer or typographer), encounter the need to craft the unheard. Because to design a silence is not the same as to pursue it or to find yourself blissfully surrounded by it, for the dead calms and stills of night and water are (depending on your beliefs) without external curation. To be taken by a pressing need to seek quietude is one thing, but the cause to be still, to rest or to be mute is most often prefaced by a request to do so. Will you be silent? We’ll take a minute’s silence. Silence, please! Most aggressive of these commands is the appeal for uppercase SILENCE, and the library, where I currently sit — a space most policed by this request — is in crisis. All buildings come with instructions for use, but the law for hush is specifically reserved for the rooms that are the guardians of books. I consciously tune in to its soundlessness and know that the library, try as it may to impose ‘a silence’, finds it cannot. Printed on every page of the score sheet for Cage’s 4’33, was the single word ‘Tacet’, a directive for the acknowledged players — the people holding the noise-makers. But the foregrounding of silence makes instruments out of everyone and everything, and in theatre and library the common chords of throats and zips and volumes escape into the governed space.
I lean back and open a book that sits to my left. Located within Cage’s notorious performance is affirmation of the ‘thingness’ of silence, and his attempts to compose and shape and push forward the absence of sound imagine it to be a thing that’s tangible and poured and co-opted into spaces. Recalibrating my senses, I reverse the figure/ground of ink/paper to nudge the overlooked space into view and expose a strategy for translating the book spread. The typographer crafts the white of the paper as well as the dark of the ink. White space is an active element like silence is an active element. Lifting the double page spread up to my ear, I wonder is it possible to hear the page? Now, book back in hand, I flit back and forth through the leaves, navigating between word and space and sound and silence to locate what I need. I find it – Stéphane Mallarmé pg. 23 – and plug into some binaural beats. In the library, positioned between composer baton and compositor stick, I attempt to tune in to the space within the book given to silence, and wonder if it’s as hard to singularly experience as Cage’s 1950s piece exposed? I can’t encompass all that silence is, but I’m attempting to open my ears to the inert and active performances played out on verso and recto—to shimmy closer. How possible is it to hear white space within the book page? Pull into near proximity all of the pauses and breaks and breaths and air that perform within the framed space of top and back and fore edge. ‘Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight and obtuseness’, said Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style. A poet’s response. The poet, through empirical knowledge, routinely weighs and measures the intensity of the pause.
From behind the window pane, a list of what I can see but not hear: four people standing, two with folded arms, face towards something out of view on the floor. Looking down, they discuss how best to take an image of the object. The person with the camera cocks his body at the waist and talks as his elbow lifts to take the shot; at a table, three people smoke and chat; a pigeon flies into view; a plane passes over; ferns move; two women stand, facing each other and laughing, casually. Through experience, my imagination can play the soundtrack of these things — like Foley souvenirs. Behind and to the right of me, thousands of books sit mutely, closed and filed.
In a beat, I can mentally conjure the width of an em — a consequential residue of my time spent as a typographer. Hence, my proximity to the book is already pretty nose-to-nose and I, like some others, have spent borrowed hours contouring the space that moves between words and lines and pages. Over time, the habitual typo-pedantry has reformatted my vision, and the thick and thin and hair spaces have lifted away from the page, from the colourless gaps they once were, to be ticker-tape like positives, collating into an indelible mental catalogue of white-space notation. When I read a book, I auto-read its space as well as its words. But here I attempt to do something different. I want to describe these little white blocks through sound. I want to hear the page, through anything other than the thing (the only thing) that pushes out sound — the words. Maybe the language of sound would be useful here. Frequencies, amplitudes and wavelengths? Or, through some act of ekphrasis, I could foreground these performing white intervals and use their structural purpose to assign a noise? Could a section space sound like the kerrrrr-chchang of a hard steely snap? If I amplify the marginal space couching the text block, would it make a low-ranging basey huuuuuuummmmmm? Maybe a paragraph indent sounds like the shuh of a swimming stroke? The large book stack next to me is groaning. I should modify. Grabbing the top of the pile, I open it up flat, and free of any text block my thumbs rest in the humming space.
Within the act of composition, to let it breathe is a common invocation, a holy understanding that an addition of air releases the choke of the congested. Like a respiratory function for the eyes and ears, air adds breeze to syntax or forces openings under drum patterns or pushes horizontal light between text lines. Listening to the page, I sense that most of its white space does not blow freely without obstruction. If I push air into its pages by thumbing it like a flip-book, the codex strobes the repeated tempo of marginal blocky-white, hitting the eyes like the underlying beat of a backing track, exposing an endoskeletal alliance with the text it locks into place. The marginal white cages syntax into oblongs, chopping and editing the word over line and page, interrupting the unmediated flow of the original voice to reformat it according to the books architecture. To the point of cracking its spine, I fold the book spread open and tune my eyes into the vertical slithers that hang in between words and discover that they trigger a metronomic pause in me, so brief it’s almost inaudible, like the persistent off-beat of a snare drum. Only when I tilt an ear towards the first few pages, the book’s front, the grand opening, do I detect the distinct and rattling trapped ghostly air of technologies past clanking through the passive and indulgent blankness.
A chapter turn can summon the involuntary inhale/exhale of breath, upsetting the lungs. Reading fraternizes with the body, subjecting it to a powerful discipline. This fleeting trauma to the rhythmic airflow puts the body in physiological alliance with the page, as mind and lungs respond to the durational white-space-pause given to the closing of one chapter and the start of another — the chapter drop. I think of the drop within electronic composition, usually signalled by a momentary lull in sound. A change-up device, the drop can be as simple as a bass cut or, more drastically, upset a track’s previous themes and rhythms. The enacting white space within poetry has similar agency. It can corrupt temporality. With invitation to the language party, poetry co-opts the background white and crafts the negative page space for its own ends. Textual recess equals durational pause and a hiatus in ink triggers a hiatus in reading. It doesn’t have to be as linguistically liberating as Mallarmé’s Un Coup de des jamias n’abolira le hasard, where fat rivers of blank trickle and bounce around framed fragmented lines, or as explicitly charged as an inserted caesura. The overlong poetry line can suffer unforeseen breakages and unexpectedly split, and indents punch out of the peripheries causing an unwanted staggered moment. In resistance to the enforced pause, the poet Anne Carson refuses to break or turn over any of her lines, meaning that, when publishers need to print her poetry, if required, her poems are typeset and printed landscape to avoid unintentional intervals or interruption to their meaning—her lines must keep their carbon-strength. Carson’s commitment to resisting any edit to her original voice inadvertently carries a cautious recognition of the muscle of the white space.
On the edge of my own periphery, the stillness breaks and I translate the chorus of shuffling bodies into a sign that the library is about to close. Titles thud shut and chairs drag. I also feel the drag of failed attempt, embraced in some kind of feedback loop, unable to untangle myself from the tight union of opposing forces, of positive and negative. I’m caught on a see-saw, an unavoidable consequence. Can I only enter silence through sound, or attempt close proximity to white space through text? If comparison also brings two disciplines into a treaty, then music and typography have become a metaphoric tag team with obvious similarities between the composition of voice and sound and break and pause with the signs and notation that stand for these things. The desire to put some air into the descriptive language of typographic composition is an attempt to nudge it away from its strictly operational values; but how possible is it to describe the enacting white space on its own terms when it leans so heavily on its own reference language? A language that blows with dust. The em and the en, the quad and the figure, descriptors for white space, are measuring units that now live in digital drop-down menus, but whose function was cast in hot metal. I am reminded that convention, with all its pedagogical usefulness, can be the harbinger of inhibition. To italicise a word or indent a quotation or to decide upon a change in typographic voice by, say, selecting Garamond over a default typeface, is to understand that articulation within the typographic space is not solely a matter of words. Or is it? I leave the library and its thousand silent scores.