Vitalpoetics

I’m still trying to get back to the 6^th of April 1744 – Swedenborg’s 6^th of April that is, the date of his first vision. I have been wondering, since my initial post, what dreams he may have recorded on that day? Will they reflect the shift in his world-view that has elsewhere been noted? Or will the date perhaps be blank as so many others are during this period of his life? Currently these questions are projected outward only to fall through the screen and shatter like the text chunks in Babelswarm.  I can not read Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams because someone else has borrowed it from the library; someone else is carrying this small blue book around, flicking through it, taking notes, perhaps theorising about those four missing pages and the child-like writing that remains on them; wondering about the meat of that executioner, at once a ‘He’ and ‘a great big woman’; and what of the little girl that walks beside him?

I adore the materiality of books, not always for the sake of the words in them as such (unless they have been inked into the margins that is) but for the hands the physical object has passed through. I would be as happy with a digital version of Journal of Dreams right now but it would never have the impact on me that The Australian and New Zealand Pharmaceutical Formulary 1934 did; that small blue book, when I picked it up at Sydney’s Rozelle Markets, still contained the hand-written script sheets of Dr. J. W. Quilter and the hand-drawn plans of a house. Not plans for actually building the house it seems, but information and advice for a would-be house-sitter (or milk thief): a circle with a cross through it indicates the location of: “Milk: on back steps – money too. No milk Wed. Night”. The kitchen is “Nice and Sunny”; the flat “all electric”; the area’s bus timetable is “available on request”; the driveway is edged by pepper and banana trees, beside the garage is an incinerator. It was these personal items stored between the pages of the book that convinced me to buy it. It was only later that I realised the poetics of the Formulary; how I can’t help but say, “Mix the Exsiccated Ferrous Sulphate” (32) in iambic pentameter and that the phrase “Tincture of Belladonna” (61) most clearly evokes for me the Zanzibar night markets where the swaying lamps gave just such a colour to the air.

Will the book as a physical object pass away in this digital age? I doubt it, it is after all an extremely effective information storage machine, not to mention its elegance and the way it symbiotically absorbs the heat from a human hand. I’m glad to have lived in an era dominated by the material book but am excited by the prospect that this dominance is coming to an end – e-books are here and if I had an e-reader I would buy Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams for about 5$ and have it right – now; that is if it had been digitised yet, which, unlike 40 or so other titles by the author it has not (so alright, e-books are (almost) here).  I’ll have to wait for this book to be returned to the library, to be pulled from someone’s bag, placed in the return shoot by their hand. Perhaps if they are out there now reading this they will leave me a message slipped between its pages or comment on this post – please, what did Swedenborg dream on the 6^th of April 1744?

Citations

Finnemore, H., ed. The Australian and New Zealand Pharmaceutical Formulary 1934, W.C Penfold & Co. LTD, Sydney, 1934.