Monuments
The meaning of “Ours” in the Calendar of A Book of Ours presents itself as the visibility of the scribes who produce the book. By contrast, the scribes of A Book of Hours and the conditions of its production remain largely invisible. The paints and paper, the participants around the worktable appear in photographs. Simple and at times crude writing styles follow upon lines of calligraphic elegance. Pen pressures, ink colors, and writing styles match in their unpredictable variety the mix of memories, person experience or observations of the day, prayer, and sententiae, bits of poetry transposed from poems. Traditionally architectural monuments belong to an aristocracy or capitalist system that succeeds by suppressing any indication of the workers forced to build it. Yeats speaks to a similar aristocracy of poetry production when he says: “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” The title, “Adam’s Curse,” refers to labor as the curse, but A Book of Ours celebrates that labor and reveals laborers as an at least temporary community: a monument of labor is a contradiction that reflects a takeover of a tradition by the people who actually constructed it. A monument, religious or secular, takes its viewer or reader out of the world of daily life into a vision of undiluted power. The audience is stunned, transported. A Book of Ours, itself a monument, draws its audience into a stimulating confusion. A Book of Hours encourages reflection, interiority and prayer; and A Book of Ours? —
HEAR: songs, recitations and chants
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