the text-ure of language

I love this picture – it speaks about the ancient roots of the word “text’ and its entanglement with texture, technology, techne….the history is always there: “concepts have a way of carrying their etymologies with them forever.” (Ong p.11). There is teaching here, information preserved and recalled…

photo taken by S Cavanagh, Japan 2010

The roots of text in techne – creative arts and craft, the exceptional skills in stone carving and architecture in this culture; and texture – the moss like a clothing or covering recalls the weaving and fabrics that moved in the 2ost century into high technology synthetic fabrics like Kevlar creating everything from clothes to cars – bibliophiles to technophiles.
These early Japanese characters were borrowed and adapted from the extremely complex Chinese system of writing … but this has evolved in the modern times into a much simpler, phonetic kanji system that Thamus might point to as evidence of his point that wisdom is gradually reduced to mere knowledge… and being able to read ‘exit’ signs – the subtleties of the poetic aspects of these languages are not enjoyed by many these days. Though I must say kanji helped me over there….

I apologize for the seeming obsession with historical photographs but in the NWT here we have a technology initiative in our schools. But as I start searching creativecommons.org or flickr for images I get this pop-up that says your quota is up and the search will be blocked – that’s after 5 minutes! So I am using all my own photos that I edit down……