Arrival

More projects are in the works here, including more Alexander. But right now I would like to show you a book I am making for a friend in the Symbolic World, Derek Fiedler. He is writing a fairly extensive analysis of Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival from 2016. The plan is to collect eight articles he is writing about the film into one volume and then offer it as a small edition of handmade books. It sounded like an interesting project and I think working with Derek on it will be a very good experience and produce some good work.

If you saw the recent interview with me about Sylvan Bookworks on Derek’s YouTube channel you will have heard his introduction to the Arrival project, as well as hear why I spend more time behind the keyboard and camera and rarely do live interviews. : )
He is a kind and generous host, even when his guest is not very eloquent or articulate in that sort of “real-time” format. Thank you all for your patience.

Denis Villeneuve’s film used a screenplay by Eric Heisserer that was based on a short story by Ted Chiang called The Story of Your Life. I had enjoyed Derek’s first article about the film even though I had not seen the film yet. After he asked me if I wanted to do this project, I thought I better go and see for myself what is going on with this story involving aliens.

Naturally the first thing I did was read Ted Chiang’s short story, which I liked very much. I read it a few times and would recommend it. In it a mother narrates the story to her daughter of how she and her father met and conceived her during a very unusual time for them and the rest of the world. It was a time when aliens arrived and she was a linguist meeting them directly trying to understand what was being revealed. What she learned helped her understand her daughter’s earthly life, which she sees in its entirety, from conception to death. Chiang gives us some interesting thoughts on language, but also within the story, how this language brought by the alien “heptapods” reveals the way they perceive time which goes beyond our linear, sequential view and is on a higher level. This is what Chiang calls their “simultaneous consciousness” in his story.

For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one word follow another sequentially. With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glottographic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech? It would never occur to them. Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page’s two-dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once.

Perhaps some could use this as a toehold on their way to understanding that eternity is more than just a really long time. And maybe a word spoken moves from the eternal into time? Perhaps. I’ll let Derek do that kind of heavy lifting in his project.

When Eric Heisserer took this story and gave it a body more suitable to making into a large-scale film, it seems like he overlaid it with the story of Exodus from the Bible. I haven’t heard him state this explicitly, even in articles about how he went about writing it, but Derek makes a good case that this is what was done. Either way, that is how it turned out and the elements are there in the pattern of the story. This is the subject of the first chapter in the book. I’ve been told the second chapter will be released very soon.

Here are some pictures of the prototype book I made. It contains just the preface and first chapter. I am also including some stills here from the film that guided me in the design. If you will be at the Symbolic World Summit in Florida coming up very soon, you can see this book and meet many interesting and good people who think about things like this.

Does this logogram mean tool or weapon? When facing aliens, discerning this is important.