Bibliographing: A Petition For Belonging

There is a story about Picasso that goes like this… Someone is introduced to Picasso and wishes to buy a drawing. He takes up a pencil, draws out a flower and hands it to the man, who asks the cost.  “$10,000” says Picasso. “But it only took you less than ten minutes to draw it!” the man exclaims.  “Actually, it took me a lifetime” Picasso responded.

My guess is that this is likely not an account of an actual event that took place. There are similar stories about an alleged nuclear power plant expert (or similar technologically complex jobs) who charge strikingly high fees for brief work in emergencies and hear similar “but it didn’t take long” excuses and similar justifications are made.  But maybe this happened with Picasso. Who knows? It doesn’t track the contours of an actual event to me and sounds like a modern-ish folk taling. But I could absolutely be wrong!

Hold on to this. We’ll come back to the story.

Now I’m not a car person, but when you see or hear two car people, who are not trying to best each other, who really know and love the makes and models and rumbles and RPM’s and the geometry of what makes the line of a 52 versus a 54 or a Caddy or a Corvette… It is a foreign tongue to me but I can appreciate it because there is often something transmitted in the sheer love and devotion to the topic that emerges in the dialogue. The desire not to win but to keep it going for its own delighting sake in the spirit of sharing and surprise is the joy of it. If you ever listened to the NPR show ‘Car Talk’ it captures this playful spirit well.

But this goes for woodworking people or ceramics people or breakdancing people or cooking people. A close grained wood or a dead blow mallet, a Cone 4 with natural temper, a toprock with popping and locking, or a fond turned into a pan sauce and balanced with butter and jus. Any of these could be entries into something of sweet accord.

I am many things but if I am anything I’m a book person. An esoteric book person perhaps more particularly. But certainly books more broadly. I have a lower case ‘c’ catholic interests. I have been a book person my whole life. I was raised as a virtual mascot in a bookstore in Greenwich Village in New York City where I literally climbed the stacks and read as a child.

So it was a great delight to me that recently I was gifted a privately published short little book. It can be lovely to be on the receiving end of a gift, to be sure. But an eyebrow raising one that makes you say “that was pretty good” is all the better. It is called “How The Little Angel Found The Point of It All.” The book is 5″ x 4″. Sixty pages. Short. Fits in your palm. It is a fairytale book that dresses in feathered veils of geometry,  sequined silks of philosophy, and brocaded wordplay. Sumptuous stuff for me. I was a goner. But what really got me was the forty item bibliography with references like Boethius’s “Consolations of Philosophy” or Henri Corbin on Iranian Sufism or Dante or Plato or a book on the Quintessence of Wine. A book that scant with that many amazing references was a sight worth seeing. If I was a car person it might have been like a 1972 Husqvarna dirt bike rolled up on my door. There is a lot of power in that two-stroke little thing. Suddenly you have my attention and I’m up for the conversation.

Others might just leaf past them but for a book person a good bibliography might as well be a secret invitation brought to you by a messenger owl at midnight for the invisible juke joint around the corner where Ray Charles and Fats Waller are playing all night. Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, and Mel Torme are trading duets and solos while Dionysus is at the bar serving his homemade wine on tap. You are going. You just are. This little book may make my bookcases groan even more. Maybe.

Another short book came through my threshold recently written by my friend Sophie Strand. “The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine – Lunar Kings, Trans-species Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists. 158 pages not including notes and acknowledgements. Utterly readable. Luminous big thinking prose with ace scholarship and a generous mytho-ecological spirit that courts wonder and rootedness by its very well wrought gravity. And a bibliography of 127 items with references from classics like Apollodorus and Ovid to Queer Theory For Lichens and Gnostic Gospels. This book is a straight up pheromone with me as the target. Boom. Maybe it is headed for you too. Check it out for sure. If you need a taster then read her substack: Make Me Good Soil.

The word bibliography itself means “writing of books”…’biblio’ from the Greek meaning book or scroll and ‘graph’ from the Greek as well meaning to write or to scratch. But the usage of it as a list of books on a subject or as reference comes into English in 1814. Having one (or a good one) isn’t just a sign of scrupulous scholarship or writerly hygiene (though it is also that) it is also an expression of gratitude, a sign of kinship and an ecological marker of a kind.

The gratitude part is easy. Writing a bibliography is a sign to the reading public that you didn’t come up with these ideas alone and that there wouldn’t be a text unless these works were present and that you can find your way to them. The kinship is expressed by saying that the book you are reading is a product of all the ones before. They are parents and grandparents, cousins, siblings, aunts and uncles. A bibliography is a deeply relational activity that is quite alive. The bibliography as ecological marker is a way of reading a landscape. If you know an area in the world quite well you know that the plants and animals and rocks and water are all just so…there. Ferns of a particular type only grow here at such and such an elevation. Mushroom X dovetails with Tree Y and spores with the help of animal Z. A great bibliography is ,ecologically speaking, at least two things. One – a proclamation that this is where I live, this is who my existence hinges on, this is where I flower and grow. It is a bending towards a kind of affirmation. Two it is an honest reckoning of how diverse the ecology really is and what holds it knit together. You will often hear the phrase “there is nothing there” spoken about a place but that is just nothing to the speaker. To the non-human world that is there it might well be quite well stitched and sorted. So a good bibliography is saying “I know my place and the ten thousand who lived here before me.”  These two works cited succeed in all counts in these regards. Both books emerge as kin in a buzzing and burbling space where ideas are butting heads like elk in rut by the edge of the flowered field and spilling onto the river slicked pebble beach where crabs snatch little fish under the shade of golden leafed gingko tree. Those elk rut on the prayer that more might be birthed soon. Who knows what comes of big thoughts rutting from page to page to page?

One could do well to cultivate that kind courtesy in our days and places but certainly in our bibliographies. Personal ones and textual ones as well.

So let’s go back to the Picasso story. Though I had heard it before, it was sent to me by the author of the “How The Little Angel Found The Point of It All.” I had written to her praising her book and her bibliography. She replied with her pleasure at my enjoyment and appreciation and then shared the Picasso story followed by “I think of this bibliography as that drawing. a simple line condensed into a flower. Would love to meet your bib sometime.”

My bibliography is a beautiful thicket trembling with drops of dew. I think about it sometimes.

Regardless, Picasso picked up a pencil in the story. That pencil was certainly a wooden shaft wrapped around a “lead” but more likely graphite core. And the graph in graphite and the graph in bibliography are the same graph. So follow me into the placing of this graph and how it might connect to a deeper function of bibliographing.