Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.
NOTATION AND THE ART OF READING
by
Karl Young
The kinesthetic link between sight, sound, and speech is mirrored by an inner speech, inner sight, and inner sound. Our thoughts are a combination of inner sight and inner speech. With this inner kinesthesia, we name things as we see them and form images of things about which we hear. Poetry, whether it is heard or seen, stimulates these inner sensations. An Anglo-Saxon warrior listening to a performance of Beowulf in the near darkness of a meadhall would not only be able to see dragons in the flickering coals of the fire, his mind would be filled with images generated by the words he heard. In like manner, a contemporary reader reading silently (provided she or he hasn't been hampered by speedreading practices) will hear an inner voice, which may call up inner sight. A great deal has been written about the "image" in poetry throughout this century. When that term is used it seldom refers to anything that can be seen on the page, but rather the inner vision of the reader.
In the mainstream culture of the western world in the twentieth century, reading becomes an ever more ephemeral, dephysicalized act. At the same time contemporary poets work against this tendency, rediscovering reading methods from other cultures and discovering new ones on their own. Though for most people reading becomes more and more a system of simple data transference, poets attempt to find alternative notations and to expand the range of their performance. In this essay I will give examples of how poetry was read in three cultural contexts removed from ours in culture and time, and then describe some forms of notation in contemporary poetry and how they can be read.
The way in which these books were read is largely a matter of conjecture. I have been studying this problem for a number of years, and will sketch some of my conclusions here. Scholars who consider the problem at all simply say that these books were mnemonic devices, used to remind readers of things they would not otherwise remember. This may have been the case with bureaucratic documents, such as the Matriculo de Tributos, but makes no sense in the case of the religious and historical books. The Aztecs were in our sense pre-literate and, like many other pre-literate peoples, they probably had excellent memories and didn't need external devices to remind them of their history or mythology. They seem to have had several orders of professional singers of myths, histories, genealogies, etc. not unlike the Yugoslavian Singers of Tales studied by Lord and Parry and the west African Singers of Genealogies brought to popular attention in North America by the tv series Roots.
The first, and probably most important, method of reading was mnemonic, but it approached memory from the other direction. We have a fairly large body of information, including citations by Sahagun's informants, that indicates that painted books and recitation of verse were major parts of education. As teaching tools the books were probably used to engrave myth and history, in a form that could be internally visualized in the minds of students. Their purpose, then, was not to remind readers of things they might otherwise forget, but to help make those things unforgettable. The brilliant and simple colors, the decisive black frame line, the striking clarity of icons, and the vibrant paratactic compositions -- the basic qualities of indigenous style -- are perfectly suited to this purpose. Students would embed innumerable myths, histories, genealogies, prayers, etc. in verse form in their minds along with the visual images in the books. The words and images need not have explained or commented on each other -- each may have balanced, complemented, or extended the other, and each probably gave the student something the other couldn't. The visual and oral components of their education would then inform their dreams, their visions, their ethics, their conceptions of the world, and their actions throughout their lives. An image of the god Tezcatlipoca would not be in a book to tell students of his existence -- they all were absolutely sure of his presence -- but to fix a concrete image of him in their minds, one that intermeshed with his mythology, his liturgy, etc.
A number of sources tell us that books of this type were mounted, fully extended, on walls for ceremonial occasions. We can imagine readers standing in front of the mounted books, reciting the verses they'd learned in youth, as they visually reaffirmed and refurbished the images in their minds. A number of people acting in this manner would somewhat resemble contemporary performances of, say, Jackson Mac Low's Gathas -- performers achieving a high degree of concentration on the images before them and on the sounds they uttered, and simultaneously feeling a sense of community with other participants. We shouldn't, however, push this parallel too far: a contemporary performance would not involve the same stored energy and association as did those of pre-conquest Mexico, but would include a sense of exploration not present in the older type of performance.
History books may have been used in the singing of epics. In this type of situation, a small audience would sit around a singer, who would place the book between himself and his audience, unfolding its pages as he sang. The book would act only minimally as a score for the singer -- its main function would be a visual counterpart of the song for the audience to contemplate (and memorize) as they listened. Books could also be read privately. Private readings were not silent readings: the reader probably recited verses of all sorts as he read. With some of the religious books, this type of reading may have been an important part of an internal self-discipline, a form of yoga. Certainly many of the religious books could have been used in visualization exercises like those practiced by Tibetan Buddhists, and this may have been an important stage in the deity impersonation so important to Aztec religion. The central section of Codex Borgia [Fig. 1] may even have been used as a set of mandalas. The religious books contain lists, charts, and calendars used in divination and in organizing ritual. These, of course, would be read in a different manner from the less compartmentalized books, and may have conveyed some new information. But even in these cases, when the reader may only have been looking for a date in a calendar, he probably did so in a prescribed manner, singing as he proceeded.
The screenfold format is well suited to these different types of reading. The Singer of Epics could spread out as many pages as necessary before his audience. The whole book could be mounted on a wall in ceremonial situations. When held in a reader's hands, a book of this type could be organized in different ways by folding up pages and thus creating juxtapositions of them. For instance, if a reader wanted to juxtapose page 1 and 6 of a book, he could simply fold the intervening pages together, placing 1 and 6 next to each other.
This would be particularly useful in using ritual-calendrical books, where charts, diagrams, and calendars would be compared and correlated. In histories it could have also have been useful: the indigenous Mexicans had a cyclical conception of history, and this format would allow comparison of one cycle with another.
An interesting feature of the books is that they could be given what I call a brief or an extended reading. In brief reading, the reader would simply identify the figures in the book and their functions. An extensive reading would involve a great deal more: the reader would recite portions of the verse associated with each image, though not necessarily contained in it. Let's say the page begins with a god: the reader would begin with an invocation of the deity, list his powers and attributes, narrate his relevant myths, and end with a prayer. The next figure is a man: the reader would recite his genealogy, his biography, maxims associated with him, and so forth [Fig. 2] A brief reading of a page might take several minutes; an extended reading, several hours. The amount of time spent reading would not depend so much on the amount of information contained in the image, but how much the reader wanted to interact with it.
A Calmecac, or University, in Tenochtitlan in 1500 would probably contain a number of people reading books in a number of different ways. One reader may have hastily determined the suitability of marriage partners by the dates of their birth, as charted in an almanac. Another might have hastily determined the days on which the planet Venus would exert an evil influence on members of one of the classes of society. A third may have just as quickly checked out the genealogy of an important person, giving the book a quick reading. Elsewhere in the school, a small group of students may have sat around a Singer of Tales, letting the images of a hero sink into their minds as they more or less automatically committed the narrative to memory. Another group may have sat in a similar circle around a scholar who explained to them the mechanics of time, the will of the stars, the proper use of hallucinogens and other sacred plants. A third group may have discussed historical problems, using a book spread out or folded into a new page order in the middle of their circle. A merchant may have shown a priest his list of goods sold to prove his humility and pay his tithe. A student of book painting may have done sketches in sand while reciting formulas concerning the symbolic nature of straight lines and curves, perhaps as they related to mathematics. A student cloistered in a private cell, after strict fasting, ritual ingestion of psylocibin and peyote, and rigorous self- mortification may have recited a mantram over and over as he concentrated his total being on the image of a deity he would impersonate, becoming a living page of the book. A high priest may have sat in his study, contemplating the interaction of omens and an upcoming festival, whose rites he would have to organize. He may not have had any books in front of him, but have made his correlations by books he had committed to memory.
For the Aztecs, the world was full of voices, human and divine. Even plants and birds had voices, and part of the business of life was learning how to understand them. The first thing an Aztec child heard on entering the world was verse exhortation, delivered by the midwife; his life would revolve around prayers, verse formulas, and incantations; and his death would be surrounded by massive recitation. The Aztecs generally did not use books to acquire new information, but to deepen what they already knew. Books were an essential part of cult, and the interaction of spoken word and painted image had a magic function. In some of the oral poetry transcribed in the roman alphabet shortly after the conquest, we find lines like "only as painted images in your books have we come to be alive in this place" -- "perhaps his heart is a painted book" -- " he [the giver of life] paints in your soul" -- and "like a painted book we will fade away." In the Aztec world, books did not provide scripts for vocalization, nor could they record a fixed sequence of words or sounds. A text was not a set of symbols telling readers what to say, but a tool that allowed them to see what they heard. Books and oral poems set up complex patterns of reverberation between each other, enmeshing the reader-singer in a totality of sensual and cerebral activity impossible in a world of phonetic books.
Copyright © 1984 and 1996 by Karl Young.