A Day at the Library
Looking at Chinese books and phone screens
I parked myself in front of the lift at the British library to eat my very green packed lunch.
Most people were too impatient for the lift. I saw the elderly and even people on crutches give up and take the stairs. Then I’d see the doors slide open just moments later.
Lots of people in the library are reading performatively.
Dunking their books on the desk. Scraping pages across each other as they turn them, exhaling loudly through their noses. Pushing their many books around their desks and biting their pencils. I suppose it’s very difficult to get away from the idea that someone is watching you in the library. Being in The British Library, especially being in the ‘restricted material’ section of The British Library does make you feel like you need to look like you’re really really studying. Someones gone through a lot of effort to go and get you these special books, maybe they’ve even been posted from Yorkshire so you better be studying properly.
When I walked past the man who was making it so clear to everyone that he was really really reading, I realised that he was reading the history of reading, the Cambridge companion to reading and the origins of reading and such. I forgave his theatricality because he was probably really overthinking what it is to read.
I’d hazard my book has never been opened before by the way its spine cracked. I was reading Chinese Musical Iconography by Helene Dunn Bodman because I’m trying to find out everything I can about the Sheng.
The five books called The Five Classics which make up Confuscian philosophy used to be The Six Classics. The sixth book was The Book of Music. but only the title of this book survives. I got very excited when I read that their was a sixth book and I assumed it still existed but had been excluded from the main cannon for philosophical reasons. I felt The Book of Music may have been too controversial but Bodman just says it’s lost.
Chinese Musical Iconography is the kind of book that makes you want to live forever. It’s so specific and I’ve only reached the point where I want to read it after years of reading and playing and talking and zeroing in on a niche. It took 20 years from my first music lesson to sitting with google translate on my phone translating Chinese music books. I’d like to reach the same point with art, theatre, science etc you know all the categories but there’s not even enough time for music.
I went to the Renaissance Women exhibition at The British Library whilst I was there and cried when I saw Hildegard von Bingen’s compositions and the huge graduals (giant books of gilded scores). When I saw these scores I thought of dedicating my whole life to church music. So many lifetimes works.
There’s an odd moment in Chinese Musical Iconography where Helene Dunn Bodman goes off on a tangent of her own. I re-read it a couple times to check that she’s not quoting from any of The Five Classics or anything and I’m pretty sure this is just an oddly candid moment in an otherwise academic text. She’s talking about the gourd that used to be the chamber at the bottom of a Sheng. She says the gourd is about contradiction: emptiness is fullness, silence is sound, poverty is wealth, solitude is omnipresence and nothingness is energy. These contradictions are true of all musical instruments, everything needs a resonating chamber, there always needs to be some void.
In Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich, the earliest surviving English language text attributed to a women, she says she see’s the entire world in a hazelnut. I’d say there’s just a hazelnut in a hazelnut but in a hollow gourd - that’s the entire world. You know cos of that Helene said. The gourd creates something out of nothing, does that sound like someone else you know?
I looked at someone’s phone screen on the Thameslink. Just glanced long enough to see they were writing a really long paragraph to someone who’s name was saved in their phone just as lots of blue love hearts. I wondered what motivated the blue hearts rather than the classic red hearts. I felt bad for looking at their phone but then it seemed like they wanted everyone to see that they were writing a very long message, they were being quite exaggerated in their thumb movements. I felt maybe they would have preferred to be having this conversation out loud for the whole train carriage to hear and part of their annoyance wasn’t at the blue love heart person but at the fact that the rest of the carriage didn’t know how annoyed they were.