My
recent posts on wikis as potential tableaux of the brain raised the
question about how the limits of the page constrain our communications,
our intelligibility. I wanted to explore this further and also extend
it to discuss how the page limits our imagination and artistic and
emotional expression.
I've kicked around the word 'tableau' in these posts but didn't define it: it means a vivid arrangement or spread.
Think of a mural, or a buffet, or even a store layout. The objective is
to let you 'take in' the entire scene, and at the same time to 'invite
you in' to explore further.
The page is a tableau, but not a
very good one. The words themselves, left unaccompanied to their own
devices, usually have to draw you in, which is why the cover art, and
the first paragraph of a book, are so important. Some writers have
decided the page should be more than a uniform, linear display of as
much text as will fit. One of the first was Marshall McLuhan, who
understood that the medium is
the message. He must have driven his publishers mad with books full of
pages like the one above, whose small print (written 40 years before
Lakoff) reads:
The past
went that-a-way.When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always
to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent
past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march
backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.
Tom
Peters' 'wow' books take a similar approach, though, in my opinion, his
layouts are more about getting attention and lack the aesthetics of
McLuhan's work (though, to be fair, McLuhan's books featured a graphic
designer and a 'producer' as 'co-authors'):
Gotta love Hugh MacLeod, though. His profound sayings with accompanying sketches on the back of business cards are a brilliant idea:
The words are still the most important, but now the medium really
is the message: the handwritten script drips with a kind of
self-loathing offhandedness that Arial and Times New Roman just
couldn't put across. And while the sketches are usually abstract, they
add profoundly to the tone of the message.
Betcha you're having
more fun reading this article than my usual posts, right? The graphics,
the experimentation with different typefaces and scripts, the
playfulness of the tableau, all make the content both richer and more
interesting. They add emotion and context, and therefore value. Maybe
that's not fair (especially for those of us who aren't artists), but
it's real.
There are
other ways and reasons for making the page more than words in rows.
Peter Senge with his systems thinking approach uses boxes and arrows
with his words to convey the relationships between the concepts and content, in ways that words alone cannot:
Mindmaps, concept maps, and social network analyses do the same thing:
Mindmap, using FreeMind.
Concept map, using IHMC's CMap tool.
Social networking map, from Entopia
And
there are also, of course, timeline charts, process diagrams, and
tables, which show words in different 'organized' ways, and even more
sophisticated visualizations that carry tables a dimension further:
Visualization from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Poets have been using tableau layouts for centuries, like ee cummings
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
...and John Hollander
One could even consider conversations
as oral word tableaux, with the words of each participant, coming from
utterly different 'places' (different brains) interleaved in space and
time, with so much of their meaning (body language, pheromones, tone of
voice etc.) utterly lost in the transcription to the linear written
page.
Take a look at these two page layouts, which are mostly text. See how much more the tableau conveys, how much more meaningful and expressive the tableau is, than the words alone could ever hope to be:
Page from an old MacIntosh Design Manual
Page from the new book Crows, by Candace Savage (my review coming shortly)
What am I getting at with all this? Two things, which I'll present as a list, another form of word tableau:
- We as writers need to liberate ourselves from the constraints of the page,
which to some extent the scrolling screen has removed (though you're
kind of annoyed having to do so much scrolling to read this article,
aren't you?), and we need to open our imaginations to discover all the
extra-verbal ways we can use the Internet medium to convey so much more
than mere lines of words can -- and, especially, convey emotion (anger, joy, play|ful|ness) to enrich what we write. Those who teach English and 'creative writing', are you listening?
- We are too constrained by HTML.
I appreciate the purpose of HTML -- allowing people with different
screen sizes, window sizes, fonts and resolutions to all read what we
write, to make websites and weblogs legible. But right now if I want
you to see my handwriting with scribbled circles and arrows, or an
unusual script, or a word tableau that involves wildly different
typefaces, sizes, colours, splashed across the screen with figures and
halftones cutting across and underlying them like the Instruments page
above, I have to use a graphic format instead of a text format, and
that is extremely expensive, memory-wise, and the result is often
illegible when I have to accommodate those with small-resolution
screens by shrinking them to a maximum width of 500px. How can we fix
this, so that my scanner becomes my composition device of choice, instead of my WYSIWYG editor?
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