Haunted (Buried) Books: Remains that remain.

I've always been fascinated by those traditions that treat books almost like people. In the Jewish tradition, sacred books that are damaged or not used are not destroyed, but buried in a cemetery. I find this beautiful and haunting. I've been burying books in my garden and then exhuming them. Here is a video of one. I left it outside for a long time and then I buried it. Then dug it up.

The image makes sense to me. A book interacting with the world. With earth, with the elements. Rain. Sun. Wind. A book resisting decay. Or fulfulling its natural role of engaging with life and death. Transformation. Beginning in the earth as seed then growth to tree, toppled, made paper then a return to earth. As with ink. And whatever cycle ideas undergo. The book as a part of the infinite number of processes of change, Emergence, decay, resurgence.

I know in one way a book is a cultural object and this framing is fanciful, ecoromantic. But in another way, everything is part of the process. It may be a precious poeticization to say so, but broadly, it is true. And a book, its bookness, is always implicitly a metaphor. It’s a kind of visual poetry: not just examining the letter but a larger form. Its medium.

This book is a body. A landscape. And you can see how it has begun to merge with its environment. Leaves, maple key, dirt. Its words have disappeared into its burial. Have changed state. Changed statement.

We are the book, of course. We made it. It is our idea(s.) The book is language also and language changes, interacts, transforms. A lifeform. A moment in time. Language is always a process. It remains fixed enough that we can share it with each other, at least for a time.

This book is like a bog person. Lost or sacrificed. It is sympathetic magic. A metaphor made material. Its pages weathered, leathered. What of the being it embodies? The meaning it carries?

I made very witchy music to go with this video:- voice, violin, bass recorder and organ drone. Music that itself has perhaps been exhumed from somewhere. Scratchy. Haunted. Decaying. Remains that remain.