words vs images: shape the power

[kaigou]

For those of you who aren't familiar with or haven't seen Mushishi, I thought it might be helpful to at least get a visual of the story's representation of mushi. [The corollary, for Mo No No Ke, is an earlier post.]

Among the AMVs on youtube, this one seemed one that (despite using non-series music) has a timbre closest to the feeling of the original. In some ways wistful, sometimes strong. Not only is nearly every frame showing various mushi, but note also that in many of the cases, the mushi themselves don't just resemble bugs; in some cases they look remarkably like hanzi/kanji characters. (In fact, at least two storylines deal with mushi that are created from, or take shape through, written characters.)

Time and again in manga and anime, magical spells are represented by a single character -- as though the character itself were being formed out of thin air and thrown at the other person: as though to cut someone, you could simply wield the word knife, or cut. Or wave a sign with that word -- and I can't think of a single instance in which the written version of a word, in the Western world, is used as the vehicle for magic. The spoken word, oh, most definitely; the only written word I can think of is the centuries-old tradition of writing out "ABRAHADABRA" and reducing each line by a single letter until the illness is gone.

This is a common topic for CP and I, though I come at it from a "how would I use that in a story" perspective, while he's just more cross-cultural in general. We're not at total concensus, just rough, but basically the long-running conversation has gotten us to this point: in the west, words have had generally the same pronounciation for a millenia, give or take an inflection or so. Spelling, however, has varied widely even all the way up to little over a hundred years ago. The western/romance languages are based on single, quasi-phonetic letters that combine to form a word (duh), and the same sound doesn't always get identical spelling -- rough rhymes with puff, but cough rhymes with off -- not to mention radically different spellings can create the same sound -- fish and ghoti being the most-quoted example.

Certainly you can take the radicals in a character -- 斬 for instance, which means 'to behead' -- and break the radicals apart into 斤 (which can mean axe, keen, or catty) and 車 (which can mean either a cart/vehicle, or to carry something in a cart). Okay, so it's not like you couldn't break characters into their radicals, but it makes no sense to do so. You read 斬 as 'to behead', not as 車斤 which might be, oh, 'cart axe' or maybe 'carrying shrewdly', who knows. It'd be rather like reading 'interrupt' as 'between sunder'. Although in the latinate languages have an kind of analogue to radicals -- 'pro' and 'con' and 'extra' and so on -- we just don't read like that. We read the entire word -- prestidigitation -- as an entire word.

That was one thing that we native-born English speakers unexpectedly -- to us, at least -- had the hardest time with, when first introduced to hanzi. I wasn't alone in that I just couldn't help seeing the individual lines and expecting them to mean something, to indicate similiarities between characters, to give me clues. I guess the reverse would be for someone to think that 'g' and 'q' must somehow be related, or (as children will do) mistake 'm' for 'n' or even 'm' for 'w'.

Here's the etymology for the word 'strive': in Middle English, it was striven, which derives from the Old French estriver (to quarrel) or maybe estrif (effort), which in turn is related to the Middle High German striben or strijven (to struggle), from the Indo-European streibh which bears some relation/connection to the Greek striphnos (solid) ... or something like that. That's whatever many spellings (not counting how people sounded stuff out before public schools and evil grammar teachers came along), but generally the sounds are pretty similar. Whether or not we're consciously aware that every modern word has changed over the millenia, the average person can't help but notice the "etymology" tag line in the average dictionary.

That's a far cry from my Chinese professor's comment that there are massive amounts of ancient -- we're talking a thousand years, maybe more -- texts in Chinese that are quite legible to the modern Chinese reader. One or two characters might be a little confusing but for the most part, it's not illegible.

Not at all the same as me doing research in my small town's court records to help a friend find the original deed for her property; we worked our way through the bills of sales and ownerships and wills all logged, long-hand, into the court's books. Page after page and there were entire sentences for which I had to struggle to parse the meaning. S's that look like extended f's, and strange Germanic-influenced combinations (like ß, so you think you're seeing 'a grob of bricks' and in fact it's a 'gross' (a dozen-dozen) of bricks).

Oh, and I should note that the dates of these records? Starting around 1780, and we kept reading until we found the deed of sale in the records around the mid-1830s. It never got easier, and it never really settled down into anything resembling a consistent 'modern' spelling. Grrrrr.

So it's no surprise that in western-based fantasy, we rarely see someone using the actual word itself as a magical framework. Like the word 'strive' -- would that magical spell be 'strive' or be 'estrif' or be 'streibh' -- and if it's a word no one has spoken or written in a thousand years -- like, say, Norse and/or Old English -- does that mean the magic is as dead as the word? How long does a word have to be 'set' before it garners any kind of magical power on its own?

Not that you can't identify words that do have significant power, at least in the US. The word STOP, for instance, or YIELD, in the right location most definitely have power. Still, outside of children's stories (in which language and language-play seems to come up more, probably because the readers are at that stage themselves), I can't think of any where the letters T, H, R, O, and W come to life as a combined unit and knock someone off a ledge.

Obviously this way of seeing things isn't inclusive, as there are exceptions and it's not like everyone in the Asian-created fantasy-genres uses characters as basis, or that everyone in the western world automatically uses sound as driving force in magical power. But it does seem to be true more often than not, and it's one more thing in which what 'makes sense' is because of something deeper in our cultural schema, rather than because the concept holds, independent of context, some kind of power as a thing-in-itself.

Actually, in thinking of any sort of (western-based and western-written) urban fantasy in which two characters have a show-down and proceed to throw air-created words -- as the written form -- at each other... Hrm. I would probably laugh, to be honest. It'd just seem so silly, when something like, oh, 'electrocute' -- did that word even exist before a hundred years ago?

Comments

[branchandroot]

Yeah, the only thing that pops into my mind is the golem with 'emeth' written on its forehead. I do wonder, though, if the divide isn't exactly eastern/western, though that's how it falls out a lot, thanks to China, as representational/phonetic. The Egyptians appear to have had a similar application of language=magic in which writing something was stronger than speaking it, and I suspect that has something to do with the representational nature of the hieratic language (see Meeks and Favard-Meeks). On the other side, I can think of no language with primarily phonetic writing forms that has the "written spell equals executed spell" thing going on.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

If we expand it to include religious application, then I'd think Islamic prayers would apply -- that incredibly gorgeous calligraphy designed to invoke the name of god, or the prophets, or a general blessing.

That's more artwork than actual written word, per se, though. I recall a Saudi coworker admitting to me that most folks -- fluent though they may be in Arabic -- still have a very hard time puzzling out some of the calligraphy. It's just so incredibly flowery that your eye gets distracted and loses the track.

For some of those calligraphers, it was very much a literal written-prayer with the words having power, but I'm not sure it applies here if the result can't be read by the general population. I mean, what's the point of throwing what looks like 'ERYCSQI' if the opponent can't read it? Would it still be effective?

Hrm.

[hokuton_punch]

Wow, that video is gorgeous - and has a little extra appeal because I'm actually familiar with the song (though not that version - someone I know on DA once did a CD of covers, and that was one of the songs she sang, so I just know her version). I REALLY have to watch this series. ;o;

Very interesting thoughts, again. ♥

Hm, and I just thought of a series where precise names are important, but it's not fantasy and also it's set in Germany (with sections in Prague), so perhaps that negates it as an example.

[tiercel]

"in the west, words have had generally the same pronounciation for a millenia..."

Uh... I realize this is not central to your argument, but I've got to disagree with that. Modern-day Brits and the people of Chaucer's time would find each other mutually incomprehensible even if they were pronouncing the same word.

I think the most prevalent use of mystic words in the western world would be kabbalah - or at least that's the most obvious thing I can think of offhand.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I'm aware that if you speak Old English, it doesn't make sense to our ears. Chaucerian English is damn near incomprehensible, and that's what I meant by inflection. Outside that, the basic phonetic elements of the words are (relatively) consistent, as opposed to, hrm, "strive" originating from, say, "cat". (When I've read Chaucerian English, for instance, the spelling is a bit funky but as long as the typeface is consistent, I can usually parse it out only if I sound it out.)

And among the latinate languages, to know French (or Spanish, or Italian, etc) gives you at least a mild leg up on understanding the others. It's not completely mutually intelligible, but it's not utterly unintelligible, either. I could get the basic gist of Spanish or Italian to some degree, when I was fluent in French.

(Although English itself is really a Norse-derived language with a heapload of loan words, but it seems to be that the more a language grabs stuff from everywhere, the less any one language-cousin is likely to be intelligible. Bummer.)

I mean, that's in contrast to say, China -- what is it, nine or eleven dialects that are completely unintelligible to each other, and yet they all use the same character-system. I can't imagine speaking to someone and not understanding but then writing "see jane run" and the other person understanding it perfectly. I guess my brain is wired for writing=sound, instead of being so separated.

Which I guess is kinda part of the point, too, that given what seems to be a universal human concept -- that language contains its own kind of power -- that those languages in which writing=sound are going to translate this differently from those languages in which writing=concept and is divorced from sound.

(Although in some ways this makes the Japanese language doubly fascinating in an academic sense, given how it's an amalgamation of both -- and yet the scrolls and o-fudo I've seen all use the older/traditional Chinese-export characters, and not the phonetic system. Hmmm.)

Kabbalah, I dunno. That system is incredibly complex, so I bet we could find eighty examples of yes and another eighty of no. Hebrew, though, isn't that an invented writing, created specifically to match the sound? I can't recall precisely (or maybe I'm thinking of something else) but I could've sworn a trick-question in my (years ago) Judaic History class revolved around the adaptation of Hebrew into a modern use-in-newspaper living language out of what had been literary-only...

Heh, gee, more to contemplate. THANKS. You trying to kill me, here?

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I sort of skimmed over some of the issues in Mushishi, and I should probably elaborate so folks don't get the wrong impression... it's a lot more ambiguous than I really went into, but it's also charming, wistful, distressing, sometimes saddening, but essentially very humane despite half the starring roles played by, well, not-human glowy bug things.

All that aside, it's a series I honestly can't recommend enough. It's gorgeous in terms of its storytelling, and it's absolutely phenomenal when it comes to the artwork, the subtle colors, how every frame ties into each episode's theme and season. It's, well, it's the anime I'd use as introduction for anyone who doesn't particularly like, or get, anime, but otherwise might be intrigued/interested in stories/esoterica from other cultures.

No real 'fight' scenes per se, no one leaps twenty feet into the air, and no special moves with the names called out beforehand. Really, it's positively subdued!

[tiercel]

I'd agree with you on the latinate languages, to be sure, but I remain unconvinced on the English. I see the distinction you're trying to draw, though.

As for kabbalah - my knowledge is extremely limited, but here's the relevant fun section of the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah#Number-Word_mysticism
(At least, that's the stuff I was thinking of.)

Vaguely related and totally fascinating to me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genizah

There's also the Tetragrammaton, but that's as much or more about speaking than writing.

I'm not sure what you mean about Hebrew, but I think what was lost over the centuries was the sound - it's only fairly recently been revived as a spoken language, but it's been a written one for several thousand years. That disconnect might have made it necessary to do something odd for modern newspapers.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Ah, I thought that might what you meant. Gematria is a lot more than just numerology, but still, it would be mischaracterizing to apply it in this case. It's a way of comprehending and creating connections (among other things) in religious texts, but its use as a charm or a thing of power... not so much, really.

On top of that, bigotry really kept kabbalah, and its subset gematria, solidly in the closet for the past two thousand years. That kind of esoterica was, well, Jewish and therefore highly suspect. It's only prevalent in the past twenty years or so, and even that is mostly due to it being tapped into by the Golden Dawn a century ago -- the prejudice just ran that deep. At that, I still wouldn't say it's prevalent, not with any true strength (and it never was a massive part of Judaism, itself, either), and certainly not to a degree needed to have a cultural impact. In terms of a long history, that is; the perception of its prevalence is probably related more to the volume of popularity/discussion about it rather than any actual depth of its use in our culture.

Going back over the various possible languages, seems like the only living written language (which knocks out ancient Egyptian) that uses its writing as a form of prayer/magic might be Islamic calligraphy. The only other example I can think of might be the Jewish mezuzah; the Islamic versions I've seen are pieces of the Quran sealed into jewelry. Both use written text as the carrier for the protection, connection to the divine, whatever.

There are versions like that in Xtianity, too, hrm, but not so many that I can think of. None, certainly, that engender such pricelessness into the written text, which isn't surprising considering the Catholic Church has, more often than not, not seen the bible as literal, or its written material, as inherently sacred, for the majority of its history. Even our more recent cultural tendency towards literalism doesn't seem to extend to "the paper it's printed on" kind of mindset.

And, too, any examples I can think of in which a charm -- religious prayer or spell -- is bestowed by a religious authority in Xtianity, it's almost always spoken, even if it's followed up by something printed. (And the 'something' is usually a confirmation of the spoken, not a replacement.) I mean, blessing of the fleet: spoken over the ships. Baptism or confirmation: spoken, though afterwards you get a paper or something that notes you got the shindig on X date by Y priest.

In the end, if what I'm saying is enough to make someone say, "I wonder if that's so," and to actually consider the question instead of just glossing past such as something that "just is" and thus taking the cultural assumption for granted... well, that matters more to me than whether or not my argument really holds water.