Being's Share of Being
On Typography and Translation, Publishing and Perishing
I’ve begun designing and typesetting the next Paradise Editions release, a pamphlet by the Guadalajara-based writer Israel Bonilla. It’s called Phoretics, after phoresis, the biological process in which an organism travels by being carried by another host organism. The pamphlet is a series of aphorisms inspired by the work of Goethe, Emerson, and Hazlitt. I could continue with this newsletter just by quoting from Phoretics, but I’ll just include the line that inspired me to publish and print this work: “The living touch of the imagination, the true completion of our tasks, endures as an accident.” Lovely. More details about its release and how to order should be available shortly. Meanwhile, I’m still offering a bundle deal on what I’ve published so far.
Having designed and typeset three books, I still consider myself very much a beginner in those disciplines. Whenever I look back at that work, I’m reminded of how haphazard the process has been. I’m grateful to the writers who have placed their trust in me, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that didn’t feel like giving up every single time I sit down at the computer to work. Whenever I embark on a new project, I have to review the most basic procedures of the software I’m using, Adobe Creative Suite in my case. I have to read and reread dozens of articles, read and reread dozens of forum threads, watch and rewatch hours of video about simple features like Baseline Grids and Paragraph Styles in order to continue.
I’ve been reassured by the pros that I’m on my way, and that there does come a point where you can work precisely and efficiently, but that seems like a long way off still. Phil Bevis, the cofounder of Chatwin Books, once told me that learning layout in Adobe was the most frustrating experience of his life. Same. Phil also told me that most presses fold before they produce a single book. I believe him. Having made it this far, I think I’ll continue to make books as long as I’m able to, but day-to-day this seems more like the continuation of a bad habit. Paradise Editions remains in the black, but if I factor in all the time I could have spent doing other things, regardless of whether they’re profitable in an economic sense or not, I can’t help but feel a sense of loss.
To pose the question bluntly, why have I given up so much of my life to fucking Adobe Creative Suite? I could be translating. I could be writing my original poetry and fiction. I could be gardening. I could be cooking. I could be playing the piano. I could be learning Spanish or Greek or Japanese or Navajo. I could be playing video games. I could be developing skills in an industry that isn’t so reliant on thin margins from a declining customer base. But if all those three books are just a sunk cost, then I’d prefer to be a pharisee of this fallacy and not stop and not give in to retrospection. The stories of Lot and Orpheus remind us of the dangers in that. You can risk everything by looking back.
But there is some kind of consolation regarding the path I’ve chosen: you can practice design and typography and those disciplines can enhance, rather than detract from, your writing; they can expand its scope. In particular, I’m thinking of Robert Bringhurst. Not only has he written the standard modern textbook on typography, The Elements of Typographic Style, but he’s also an accomplished poet, essayist, and translator as well. I was recently reading his translation of Parmenides’ treatise On Nature, in which the pre-Socratic philosopher lays out his vision of a changeless and indestructible cosmos.
What is is thought itself, as well as what is thought of. You will not find thought apart from being, to which it is betrothed. In the same way, time is not—and is not going to become— something other than and separate from being. Being’s share of being hold’s being motionless and whole.
Parmenides’ extant writings are highly fragmentary, their meaning elusive and highly contested. Reading a scholarly translation of the same passage gives some sense of how difficult it is to synthesize On Nature into a work that’s legible to non-experts.
The same thing is for thinking and [is] that there is thought; For not without what-is, on which [it] depends, having been declared, Will you find thinking; for nothing else <either> is or will be Besides what-is, since it was just this that Fate did shackle To be whole and changeless;
It’s reassuring that Bringhurst, even after giving so much of his life to apparently inconsequential details of margins and kerning, can come up with such a beautiful and succinct translation—I leave the question of accuracy to the classicists. It’s a bit like Parmenides’ vision. We may think that elements of our lives are irrevocably lost, but it just could be that, behind the curtain of the illusion, there is a complete, sufficient version there waiting for us.
