Robert Bringhurst

The essays in this book stretch the bounds of thought. For example, music is discussed in relationship to language, literature, myth, philosophy, painting, and even typography. This discussion is of typography in the modern (or post-modern) sense that those who in the twenty-first century participate in the computer revolution are likely to have an interest in typography. Thus on page 118 we find this statement:
"But typography isn't something to watch; it's something to do, like writing and show more reading and cooking and music and literature. It's an intrinsically rewarding, honest craft. And the nature of craft is that mental and physical ways of being stay in touch; they hold each other by the hand."
So, yes typography is like music in that sense and slowly, as you peruse the other essays (that quote was from an essay titled, "To Tell the Truth by Lying: Gorgias the Sicilian and a Theory You Can't Refuse") you become entwined in the connections that everything worth thinking about has with everything else. The quoted essay leads up to the riff on typography through a discussion of Homer, Socrates, and Plato - author of the Gorgias. In fact this essay is a microcosm of the collection as a whole; essays are included with specific titles but with amorphous paths of prose as they get to their point. The path the essays lay down for the reader leads from Mythology to Haida Oral literature and the poet Gary Snyder -- on the way there are excursions through the philosophy of poetry, the art of Joan Miro, and Bach as interpreted by Glenn Gould. And that is just the tip of the proverbial ice cube.
The underlying theme of the collection is presented in the title of the book and if you are interested in the nature of being you may be just the reader to delight in Robert Bringhurst's Dance. show less

This is more valuable for the context it gives and the issues it points out with how indigenous stories were recorded and how they’re still treated, than for the translations and discussions of the stories themselves. Not that those aren’t important too, because Bringhurst rightly points out that these stories are oral literature, and poetry, but, like, he’s a white poet who taught himself Haida so… grain of salt. At least.

Anyway, tackling the poetry and stories on their own, first show more off. The translation reminds me a lot of Robert Fagles’ treatments of Homer, in that it’s very readable and accessible to people who don’t read poetry, but also not the truest to the source material. (Bringhurst provides some passages in the original and I have enough linguistics training to see there are phrases that don’t line up, plus, well, indigenous verbs and concepts of agency are very different from English ones and he barely tries to capture things, sometimes.) I did appreciate seeing the stories laid out in free verse and that Bringhurst keeps the cadences of speech. I did not so much appreciate his decision to translate names into English à la “Dances With Wolves” instead of relying on footnotes to do that work for him.

Bringhurst makes a convincing case that these stories should be treated as literature instead of, say, half-remembered myths or recitations, and that they should be given the importance they’re due as a result. There’s a lot of discussion of how the stories fit together into cycles, and the way the symbolism and structure supports the idea that the storytellers thought about the stories and crafted their telling, and a chapter or two comparing two versions of the same story to really highlight that each teller had his own voice and style. A few times I thought he went a bit far with his thesis, making assumptions or asides he couldn’t quite back up, for on the whole, I was on board.

Like I said, though, the most important thing about this book is the history in it and the discussion of early anthropology. Bringhurst not only delves into the mind of the anthropologist through his letters and presents him as a complex person who was trying to be respectful of the Haida though occasionally failing because of his upbringing, but he also discusses early anthropological efforts as both a compare-and-contrast sort of thing and to show how shoddy and racist thinking has resonated through the ages. The ideas that getting the original words doesn’t matter as long as you get the gist, and that mashing multiple versions into a One True Telling is appropriate, have been especially harmful. Suffice to say, after reading this, I’m more aware of the questions I should be asking and the issues I should be aware of, while reading collections of indigenous stories, and for that alone, reading this was worth it.

And Bringhurst doesn’t just call out anthropology and folklorists. He makes a point of showing how much was lost in the epidemics and how much we can’t even know was lost, and how Haida culture, for better or worse, prioritised female elders/storytellers so much that few of them made the written record, and how racism and bureaucracy left these records (and who knows what else) to languish in archives when they should be studied and repatriated. It’s as infuriating and depressing and important as his call-outs of anthropology and folklore.

So … yeah. It’s pretty woke in a lot of ways, though Bringhurst doesn’t quite live up to his goals either in terms of his translation or his response to criticism, which is … less holistic or respectful than it could be. (There’s a fair bit of “yes but” and “I talked to two Haida people and they said it was okay.” And by fair bit, I mean a foreword and appendix.) It’s definitely an important book to read if you’re interested in mythology, folklore, or indigenous cultures, but I don’t recommend it to anyone likely to take it all at face value and not thinking about wider contexts.

Warnings: This is a work of literary criticism addressing Indigenous culture, written by a middle-aged white man who is imperfect in his social justice and has a tendency to justify himself against accusations with academic versions of “whatever” and “some of my best friends are Haida.” Also, if you can’t handle tactful discussion of colonialism as applied to First Nations people (such as banning potlatches, Christian missionaries, epidemic death tolls, and apathy), perhaps this is not for you. Also also, this includes stories about Raven, who’s known for having non-consensual sex.

8/10 show less

A STORY AS SHARP AS A KNIFE: ON ORAL THOUGHT, EXTINCTION, AND THE VOID BETWEEN WORDS

I. THE QUESTION
For millennia, oral cultures found ways of living in and with place. What is it about writing that turns a community into a parasite, a conflagration spreading across the land with ever-intensifying devastation?

This question stands at the heart of many of the most fertile thinkers of our time: Rudolf Steiner, G. I. Gurdjieff, Robert Bringhurst, Martín Prechtel, David Abram, and Martin Shaw. show more What follows is an attempt to listen for a common pulse running through their work.

II. LIVING THOUGHT AND THE DEATH OF THE WORD
Rudolf Steiner taught that the spoken word carries the life forces ("Ätherkräfte") of the speaker. Writing, by contrast, is an act of death—a kind of rigor mortis of living thought. Only after World War I was Steiner willing to allow the publication of his lectures, and even then he prefaced them with a warning: “dead words” can only awaken understanding if read meditatively.

For Steiner, the issue of oral versus written expression was secondary to the quality of thought. "Lebendiges Denken" (living thinking) is an act of creation, a participation in the world’s ongoing self-unfolding. By contrast, most thinking is “dead,” what Carol Sanford calls “thoughting:” the endless rehashing of inherited ideas, divorced from place, presence, and relationship. Living thought can inhabit writing, but only with great effort—an act of resurrection.

III. GURDJIEFF: EMBODIED TRANSMISSION
For Gurdjieff, true transmission was embodied—voice, gesture, rhythm, attention, relationship. These could awaken something latent in the listener. Writing, by comparison, fossilizes ideas. To counter this, Gurdjieff fashioned his texts as labyrinths—initiatory mazes requiring genuine effort from the reader. He meant them to be read aloud, in community. Written words are fragments, seeds, awaiting re-vivification through lineage and practice.

IV. PRECHTEL: STORIES THAT FEED THE HOLY
In Martín Prechtel’s world, oral culture is metabolically alive. Words are spells; to speak them with eloquence is to feed the holy. Storytelling keeps the world alive, that it might “jump up and live again.” When we stop telling the stories, they start eating us. The Western world, he says, is a crypt full of hungry ghosts. Addiction, depression, genocide, ecocide—these are symptoms of our amnesia, of asking the world to fast during spiritual famine.

Writing can serve, but only as a waymarker pointing the way back towards something of meaning. Words hold no breath. Written memory preserves record but not reciprocity. Speaking, by contrast, is an act of remembering. Like Gurdjieff, Prechtel wrote his books to be read aloud, performed back into breath.

For him, oral culture is part of the metabolism of the village—a cycle of gift, grief, and gratitude shared among humans, landscapes, and spirits. When we cease that exchange, the world begins to starve.

V. ABRAM: LANGUAGE AS PARTICIPATION
David Abram reminds us that language is not a human invention but a mode of participation in a planetary symphony: wind, water, birds, locusts, thunder. The oral is sensuous and animistic. Writing, in contrast, abstracts language from the senses and draws our attention out of the breathing earth into the sterile realm of symbols.

Meaning, Abram insists, is held in place. When we forget this, language shifts from participation to representation. Yet writing, too, can be re-animated; Abram calls for a sensuous literacy. As Thomas Berry might ask, what if the written word could become another facet of the Earth’s own speech?

VI. SHAW: THE BARDIC THRESHOLD
Martin Shaw, mythteller and bard, moves in this liminal terrain. Founder of myth schools at Stanford University and in Devon, England, Shaw writes prolifically, but his books are meant to be heard. Speech is offering; listening is devotion. Myths, like animals, must be courted, not memorized. To tell a myth well requires sacrifice. Through that sacrifice, the myth is fed, and we are made whole.

VII. BRINGHURST AND THE HAIDA WORLD
With this lineage as backdrop, we turn to Robert Bringhurst, whose A STORY AS SHARP AS A KNIFE (1999) stands at the midpoint of this chorus. Though the book reads as literary scholarship, it is in fact the prelude to two volumes of translation—NINE VISITS TO THE MYTHWORLD (2000) and BEING IN BEING (2001)—which render in English the works of Haida mythtellers Ghandl and Skaay.

Late in A STORY AS SHARP AS A KNIFE, Bringhurst recounts a tragic 1908 episode: at the direction of the Royal Museum of British Columbia, trophy hunters shot the remaining three scions of the Dawson’s caribou. In a single stroke, the Western mind “apprehended” specimens for its catalog of dominion—at the cost of extinction. The act stands as archetype for Bringhurst’s thesis: observation can destroy what it studies. Anthropology, like Colonial science more broadly, too often kills the living thing to preserve its image.

Through his collaboration with Haida artist Bill Reid in the 1980s, Bringhurst encountered the richness of Haida mythic art and language. He learned that around 1900, anthropologist John Swanton had taken the extraordinary step of recording Haida stories in Haida language through direct dictation—rather than through the usual translator’s compression. That fidelity preserved depth lost, virtually universally, to other Indigenous literatures documented by anthropologists.

Bringhurst’s insight, echoing his quote from page 337, is that to “reduce all Blackfoot versions of a myth to a single stereotypical version” is like conflating all Italian crucifixions into one scene. Standardization, he writes, “is the antithesis, not the culmination, of culture.”

VIII. NEGATIVE SPACE AND THE VOID
The Haida are the people of Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the British Columbia coast. Following first European contact in 1774, their population collapsed by 93 percent—a catastrophe on a scale few civilizations have survived. The mythtellers, Ghandl and Skaay, spoke from within that aftermath, keeping their world alive through their people's ancient stories.

Bringhurst notes that meaning often resides in what is unspoken. Swanton’s genealogies, taken from men in a matrilineal culture, list fathers and sons but omit the crucial mothers and aunts. The unnamed figures define the structure by their absence—an eloquent negative space mirrored in Haida art.

Architect Christopher Alexander called this principle "positive space:" the vitality of the “background” that shapes all form. In THE NATURE OF ORDER, he wrote that at the heart of any living structure lies the Void—“like water, infinite in depth, surrounded by and contrasted with the clutter of the stuff all around it.”

A true myth, Bringhurst suggests, is shaped by that void. Meaning arises from the spaces it leaves open. To explicate or “capture” the void is to kill it. Like the mounted head of Dawson’s caribou, what remains is the husk of a vanished presence—the remorse of extinction.

IX. EXTINCTION AND MYTH
Here we glimpse the deeper continuity between biological and cultural loss. Myths, like species, evolve across eons; each arises from a precise meeting of place, people, and time. Once extinguished, they cannot be regenerated within the span of centuries.

Bringhurst writes, “The mythteller’s calling differs little from the scientist’s: to elucidate the structure and workings of the world.” Both are instruments of a civilization’s continuance. But while the scientist’s insights may flower within a lifetime, the mythteller tends a lineage of immeasurable depth.

As species vanish—the golden toad, the Pinta Island tortoise, the Guam flying fox, the Chinese paddlefish—each loss rips a drop from Indra’s Net. “We experience a living whole,” Alexander writes, “as being at one with the world, and not separate from it.” Each extinction—whether myth or species—diminishes the mirrors through which the world perceives itself.

X. CLOSING
Perhaps the question is not simply about writing, but about whether our stories—spoken or written—still feed the world.

The world, as the Haida proverb warns, is as sharp as a knife. If we fail to attend, we will fall right off. show less

Quite comprehensive and clearly written, exactly what I was looking for after reading Stop Stealing Sheep. It was funnier than I expected, the author writes with a lot of character and clearly has a bone to pick with computers, which was entertaining as a web developer reading this to learn more about typography. It's obviously a beautifully crafted book and I'm glad to have read it as a physically printed book rather than digitally. Feels like Bringhurst would have approved.

Full disclosure, show more I didn't read all of the appendices (which make up like 1/3 of the book) show less