Our type

The Taj Mahal is not a building, but a book. Its surface is covered with text, but in a script often so abstract it has passed beyond a representational system into pure art.  That art was born of Islam's stern edicts concerning pictorial images which were considered a derogation of Allah's divine rights.  As a result, artists turned to the only stuff they had, the words of God, as conveyed through his prophet Mohammed in the Koran.  Since the content was immutably fixed, great artists were forced to express themselves through subtle variations in the form.  The mullahs could hardly object; nothing was added or taken away from the meaning; the ornate style was simply a manifestation of the artist's reverence for the unchanging verities of the Book.
 
Great civilisations further east have adopted a similar approach.  Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings often include poems or other texts.  Poets produced copies of their verses which were themselves treasured as works of art.  Part of the poetry lay in the creation of beautiful ideograms, and the truly great poem was one that married form and content in a single perfect expression of the poet's feelings.

Western culture shows a signal blindness to the form of things. Calligraphy has never been taken seriously as an artistic discipline; if regarded at all, it is as decoration.  Instead we have become obsessed with content, always trying forlornly to dissolve the mediation which stands between us and the text.  Hence our obsession with simplifications, condensations, extracts - all designed to give us the essence, the Platonic heart. Our Koran is The Reader's Digest.

But we delude ourselves. As the East knows well, even if only unconsciously we read the form as well as the content.  Witness the distaste with which we greet even slight redesigns of favourite newspapers and magazines: though we cannot articulate the problem, things look off, strangely wrong.  Some can say why, and do know that appearances are important.  They are the typographers, the crafters of the faces we choose churlishly to ignore.  They and the designers who use their work know the subtle magic of the serif, the crude impact of the bold, the foxy grace of the italic.  They know the myriad alchemies of mixing types such as Times, Bodoni, Futura, Palatino and Oracle.

Like subliminal messages, the characteristic forms of letters leave their imprint on us, a resonance lingering in the mind, inkily colouring the words they carry.  This colouring works both ways: typefaces may tinge our view of a word and its concept, but in a kind of Newtonian balancing of reaction and action, those typefaces are similarly infected by the ideas they convey.  By constant repetition of such associations, entire categories of life fall into disjoint classes determined by their common defining letterings.  As a result, surreal gossamer linkages lie across our culture, as a typeface strongly associated with a shampoo turns up in that of an airline or of soup, or another linked in your mind with a magazine is seen carrying a poster hoarding's propaganda.  Everything we choose or do or think tugs at and is tugged by these threads; they form a tiny but key part of that complex entity which goes to make up our 'type'. 

(9.12.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - A Chinese Scroll

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