ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  While reading silently—letting throat and tongue rest, with even the lips stilled, the finger kept from pointing—the mind can mind itself. Freed of the body, it can skip and jump, rush ahead and fall behind, both in the text it’s reading (earlier pages remembered, later pages expected), and in the text that is itself (memories and expectations). There could be no difference, however, between Augustine’s reading of a consecutive/unidirectional book and of his own nonconsecutive/omnidirectional intelligence. For him, time and space were nonexistent, unless the space was here and the time was now: presence, the present—idipsum or id ipsum, favorite terms of his that mean, the both of them, “the selfsame.”*2

  The present is Augustine’s object, subject, and surety. As an older man he asked (an older man’s question) how the future seems to decrease, when it did not exist yet? and how the past seems to increase, when it did not exist still? He settled on a trinity as explanation: “It is because the mind expects [expecto], attends [attendo], and remembers [memoro], so that what it expects becomes what it remembers by way of what it attends to.”

  Attention, for Augustine, is the fundamental medium: It “has a continuity, through which what is present becomes absent.

  “Therefore, the future, which does not exist yet, is not long; rather, a long future is only a long expectation of the future. Nor is the past, which does not exist still, long; rather, a long past is only a long memory of the past” (italics mine).

  It should be evident that Augustine, in this passage describing what attention is and is useful for, embodies his own process: expecting what he’s about to say, attending to saying it, and in the next sentence remembering, by reflecting on what he’s said.

  I am about to repeat a psalm with which I’m very familiar. Before I begin, my attention encompasses the whole, but once I’ve begun, all that becomes past as I speak it, and so is retained again in my memory. My activity is divided between my memory, which contains what I’ve repeated, and my expectation, which contains what I’m about to repeat. Yet my attention is continually present, and through it what was future becomes past. The more this is repeated, the more the memory is greatened—and the expectation, lessened—until even expectation passes into memory. This, in turn, ends the action, which passes into memory as well. Further, what takes place in the entire psalm also takes place in each individual portion of it, even in each of its syllables. This holds too for the even longer action of which this psalm is only a portion. The same also holds for the whole life of man, of which all the actions of men are only parts. The same also holds for the whole age of the sons of men [italics mine], of which all the lives of men are only parts.

  This passage not only embodies what came before but also engages a phrase from the psalms, “the sons of men,” both to demonstrate that memory can be recontextualized and to reveal which psalm he was, at least partially, repeating. (The phrase recurs in over twenty psalms, including Psalm 4.)

  Finally, though, it’s the vocabulary of the Confessions that renders Augustine untranslatable. Like all Latin writers of his era, he makes no distinction between “soul” and “mind,” using anima and animus interchangeably. This could be because he, or his age, believed they were selfsame. Or else it could be because the only way to insist on a distinction is to make a distinction—to prioritize the mental—and, in the dim depths of autocognition, he sensed this and fled from the light. Perhaps he also sensed that the penitent cannot make such, or any, decisions, but rather must live in a perpetual attention to miracle, a religious life being a vigilant life—one in which attention is sustained, and sustaining, not parsed. To become aware of revelation is to lose revelation; to become conscious of the present is to gain only past.

  *1 No matter what was in his head,

  such a man cannot be misread.

  *2 Augustine encountered the term in Psalm 4: In pace in id ipsum dormiam et requiescam. “In peace in the selfsame I will sleep and rest.” When Augustine read this psalm, presumably silently, and came to id ipsum, he “cried”—he read it aloud. Augustine’s primary Bible was the Vetus Latina, based on the Greek Septuagint. (At the time, Jerome hadn’t even embarked on his Vulgate.) The King James, which was translated directly from Hebrew, renders the phrase: “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep.”

  E. DISARTICULATION AND ARTICULATION, PAPER AND INK AND IMPLEMENTS, COPYING, COPYING

  (WRITING 1)

  THE FIRST TRANSLATION OF THE Torah into Greek, the Septuagint, was undertaken by a committee of seventy-two rabbis who knew Hebrew or just one another so well that, despite being forced to work independently in seventy-two sealed chambers—party to a gambit intended to expose disagreement and so falsehood in the law—all their versions emerged utterly the same, down to the last word, the last letter, and so the law was revealed as incontrovertible truth and even the evil commissioner, Ptolemy II, was appeased (or so goes the Talmud’s legend).

  Jerome was the first single translator to attempt to put what had become known as the Old Testament into Latin, though, perhaps because his Hebrew was rudimentary, he made reference to the Vetus Latina (an earlier Latin compilation of disparate renderings), and the Septuagint, in the production of his Vulgate. Jerome died in Judea, was buried in Bethlehem, reburied, partially, in Rome, though some say that his head was entombed just north at the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta in Nepi, while others say that it’s interred at the royal Escorial, just north of Madrid, where it’s administered by monks of the Augustine Order. Augustine himself is relicated all over Italy, especially in Pavia, though during the Napoleonic Wars the prime reliquary was sheltered in Milan, where Ambrose lies intact. Decapitation, disarticulation: What was punishment for Orpheus was honor to the Church.

  These men were taken apart like texts, recast, redacted, moved around—spreading as the Church spread, west across Europe, each new fragment a new connection to the source—spreading too as their books spread, as literacy animated animae and animi, but silently. By the eighth century, scriptural punctuation was standardized, and sentences began to begin with capital letters. In the vernaculars, orthography—how to spillon, spellon—spell—was reformed.

  Monks copied by consulting copies, or originals, or by taking dictation—reading aloud becoming a specialized function. An anonymous scribe of the eighth century: “You can’t believe how demanding the work is. Three fingers write, two eyes see. One tongue speaks, all the body labors.”

  The ninth century finds so many copyists copying so many texts that to banish confusion a mandate is passed: Monks must remain silent in the scriptorium. Communication among the scribes becomes sign language. Earlier, Judaism had innovated the use of chironomy, or finger signals, used by a secondary silent reader—a mute copy editor or proofer—to indicate to the primary audible reader the various cadences of scriptural cantillation, a practice later adapted for recitations of the Koran and Gregorian chant. Monks who needed a new book to copy raised their hands and pretended to leaf through nonexistent pages. If a psalter were needed, they’d crown their heads with their hands in a reference to the psalmist King David. A lectionary was called for by cleaning imaginary wax dripped by imaginary candles, a missal by crossing the chest. A secular work—of philosophy, medicine, law—if it wasn’t banned, was requested by scratching the body, as if the itch of free thought were an infestation of fleas. Heresies accumulated with knowledge. The Second Coming had come and gone, and Jesus was a woman. God was three, or one, or the one martyred on the Cross. The soul and the flesh were one, or two, or the soul was the Word while the flesh could be transubstantiated through bread and wine, or was only substantially represented by them, though regardless of whether communion was symbolic or not, it could only be administered by clergy (the mind, meanwhile, was of the soul, or of the flesh, or separate and mediating between). Christ was entirely mortal. Or entirely divine. Original sin never happened. The Spirit alone illuminated and the testamen
ts were but fabrications. Only the pope could interpret the Bible, or everyone could, and salvation had a price, in silver or gold. Theses were nailed not stigmatiferously through wrists and feet but to doors. In 1085, Alfonso VI, king of Castile and Leon, conquered Moorish Toledo and sought to impose the Roman rite—substituting the Latin liturgy for that of Mozarabia (the Visigothic Church). A Latin prayerbook and a Mozarabian prayerbook were hurled into a fire. By the time the Latin was totally consumed, the Mozarabian had been only slightly damaged, though the king decided to ignore the intervention and enforce the Roman rite nonetheless.

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  BOOKS OUT OF VELLUM, or parchment, were more likely to be proven innocent at trials by fire. Books out of paper—cheaper and so more popular; the material more suggestive, more open to imprinting—were adjudged guilty, even before the kindling was sparked. Paper of bark, bits of fishnets, cloth rags, and hemp was invented by the Chinese around the first century B.C.E., and in popular use by the second century C.E.—Han Dynasty—unfurling west through Arabia. The Song Dynasty, 960–1279 C.E., had produced the first paper money by the time the Muslims introduced the technology, for writing and not for trade, to Iberia. Water mills allowed its mass production (1282, Aragon), and watermarks allowed each surface to be identified with its maker, or user (1300, Fabriano). Recycling, or deinking a page to be pulped back to fibers and remade—repaginated—was invented by a jurist named Justus Claproth (1774, Göttingen).

  The ink, the communicative medium either liquid, paste, or powder. A trinitarian colorant/pigment, a binder, additive/carriers. Ink itself is the unisonous binder. Chinese inks of plant dyes and blood, ca. twenty centuries before Christ (the God). Chinese inks of soot and glue, ca. three centuries before Christ (the man). At the time, India’s ink was not yet India ink, but masi, concocted of burnt bones, tar, and pitch. Indigo was distilled from the leaves of legume plants, the Indigofereae. Jews favored snail ink, a purple that, when exposed to air, lightened bluer—from royalty’s hue to a plebe colorant for garments. The Greek term for the cuttlefish genus is Sepia, which squirted their ink. Rome favored recipes using iron salts, such as ferrous sulfate (“vitriol”), mixed with tannins (“gall”). Europe opted for soaking hawthorn branches in water, boiling the water, then brewing again with iron salts and wine. Black inks based on carbon, made with soot bound with glue or gum arabic, common until the twelfth century, tended not to corrode paper as efficiently as did black inks based on iron. Neither Greek and Roman carbon inks, nor the ferric inks of the Church, were feasible for printing. Both blurred when applied to metal plates, when the plates were applied to paper. The solution, literally, was ink based on turpentine and oil.

  The implement. White chalk, black charcoal, on cave walls and slate. Bone styli, sharpened into clay and wax. Chinese brushes of rabbit and deer hair. Bamboo sticks. Crayons, sticks of lead and grease. Egyptian reeds of Juncus maritimus, or sea rush, a relation to the papyrus they marked (the papyrus exported from, and giving its name to, the port of Byblos, entrepôt of all bibliography and the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city).

  The reed was replaced by the quill when papyrus was replaced by parchment (animal skin), or vellum (strictly calfskin), ca. fifth–third centuries B.C.E. Skin, being smoother, allowed for finer writing, tighter-spaced. These quills, from bird feathers preferably molted, not plucked, were denominated in declining order from their attachment to wing, the best being the pinion, the first. The left-wing feathers were for R-handed scribes, as those feathers curved away from the sight line and over the hand. Scribes opted to change nib angles—cut with a penknife—rather than the angles at which they held their pens, and so contorting their hands and depleting them. Nibs were cut square for glyphic alphabets, in nonglyphic alphabets only for R-handed scribes, while oblique cuts, at 25 to 30 degrees to the left, were for L-handed scribes, or for R-handed scribes in R-to-L languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

  The quill’s notched point, like an arrow’s, the quill itself an arrow of all fletch. The feather—Latin’s penna—that became the pen. Copper nibs, which appeared by the first century C.E., had to be dipped in ink between each character. The reservoir pen—an implement centered around a capillary that held ink sufficient for a line, or a complete document, which was inspired by the calamus, or hollow shaft, of the feather—debuted in the tenth century, the conception of al-Mu’izz li-Din Allah, Caliph of Egypt.

  The unrefreshable pencil—Latin’s penicillus, “small tail.” When a gigantic deposit of graphite was found at the turn of the sixteenth century in Cumbria, England, the element was identified as “lead,” and so the pencil’s black core is misidentified still. Snapping, breaking. A casing, of juniper, debuted in Italy by 1560.

  Patent of steel nib, 1803. Mass production of steel pens, 1822. The fountain pen, the popularization of the Caliph’s invention, Petrache Poenaru, France, 1827. 1858, Hymen Lipman of Philadelphia received U.S. Patent 19,783: “I make a lead-pencil in the usual manner, reserving about one-fourth the length, in which I make a groove of suitable size, and insert in this groove a piece of prepared india-rubber (or other erasive substance), secured to said pencil by being glued at one edge. The pencil is then finished in the usual manner, so that on cutting one end thereof you have the lead, and on cutting it at the other end you expose a small piece of india-rubber, ready for use, and particularly valuable for removing or erasing lines, figures, etc., and not subject to be soiled or mislaid on the table or desk.”*

  The point, the nib, the felt tip, the rolling ball—all are fixations. They fix the hand, even while marking the line between its functions: clarity to all, and recognition of self.

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  PRIOR TO GUTENBERG’S TYPOGRAPHY, chirography—handwriting—had been a quest for ecumenical perfection. Medieval monks, practicing manuscripture, worked toward the perfection of a hand in which the authority of the collective was privileged over that of the personal achievement. This sublimation is evident in every scribal hand: from the earliest scriptura continua, inwhichthetextwasn’tseparated, to uncial, a totally Majuscule hand, named after the half inch that each line had to occupy, through the Carolingian hands—called after Charlemagne, who reigned like a Majuscule, though his reforms included the use of minuscules and commas—and the later Gothic hands (literally “barbarous,” “vandalizing,” to the Italians), which solemnized commas into cathedral struts, finials, and minims, enough to render them carceral, as if the characters were bars, imprisoning monks in cells of lonely literacy.

  The ink of antique writing serves to mire words in vagary and doubt, giving rise to multiple print interpretations that in turn have acquired their own truths, and a species of religious disputation. Reproduced above is a fragment of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete Christian Bible, in the collection of Egypt’s Saint Catherine’s monastery, at the foot of the putative Mount Sinai.

  Maranatha, one of the few Aramaic words in the entire New Testament, appears only once, at the conclusion of 1 Corinthians. Due to its obscurity, the word has always been transliterated, not translated, into Greek, Latin, and the English of the King James. A custom of confusion attends the matter of whether maranatha is intended to read marana tha—“Come, O Lord”—or maran atha—“Our Lord Has Come.” Had the Testament originally been typeset for the printing press, or on a computer and that space unicoded in its proper place, humanity would be able to tell whether that phrase was a call for Christ’s Second Coming, or merely a creedal decree. God would be satisfied, though the reader’s experience of the text would be poorer. The Codex Sinaiticus, the work of an unknown scribe or scribes, has been digitized in its entirety. Both variants of maranatha are available as translations online.

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  HANDWRITING MUST BE LEGIBLE ENOUGH to be read by all, yet it will always bear the mark of the individual. The modern recognition of distinct persona
lities in the formation of consonants and animation of vowels dates to the Renaissance. Paradoxically, the new writing hand that developed in Italy in the fourteenth century—a hand more fluid and so more suited to individual expression—became, with the advent of the press, the first font. What started as an italicism—or, alternately, as “cursive,” from the Latin for “running”—ended as the standard setting for Renaissance publishers, especially for their translations of Latin and Greek that turned classical texts into Classics. Antonio Sinibaldi, scribe to the Medicis, had an elegant, gracile hand. He was put out of work by Gutenberg’s press in 1480, but found a sinecure as a writing instructor and calligrapher. The usurpation of Sinibaldi—the first major scribe pensioned by machine—personalizes, with a valedictory flourish, the rift between humanity and technology.

  Just as today a fervid minority denounces the digitization of literary experience, fifteenth-century literati responded to their own depredations. In 1492, Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote De Laude Scriptorum, “In Praise of Scribes,” a polemic addressed to Gerlach, Abbot of Deutz. Trithemius’s intention was to uphold scribal preeminence while denouncing the temptations of the emerging press: “The printed book is made of paper and, like paper, will rapidly disappear. But the scribe working with parchment ensures lasting remembrance for himself and his text.”