Nonsense from the sky

I was recently chatting with a friend about how little it takes to get woo-woos all stirred up -- and how impossible it is to get them to simmer down afterward -- and that got me thinking about A Book from the Sky.

If you've never heard about this strange publication, you're not alone; it never got a great deal of attention outside of China (except for one other subset of humanity, q.v.).  It's the creation of award-winning Chinese artist Xu Bing, who has made a name for himself pushing convention and working paradox and surreality into his creations.

A Book from the Sky (天書; Tiānshū) looks, to someone like myself who knows no Chinese, like nothing more than page after page of artistically-laid-out Chinese calligraphy:

Cover page of A Book from the Sky

The first clue you might have that something is amiss is that the characters for the book title -- 天書 -- don't appear on the title page.  In fact, they appear nowhere in the book.

In another fact, none of the characters in the book are actual Chinese characters.  Chinese scholars have gone through the whole thing painstakingly and found only two that are close to real Chinese characters, and one of those is only attested in a supposed ninth-century document that might itself be a forgery.  (Whether the inclusion of that character was deliberate, or is merely an accidental resemblance, isn't certain, but I suspect the latter.)

Now, let's be clear about one thing right from the get-go.  Xu himself states up front that A Book from the Sky is nonsense.  Here's his description, from his own website:

Produced over the course of four years, this four-volume treatise features thousands of meaningless characters resembling Chinese.  Each character was meticulously designed by the artist in a Song-style font that was standardized by artisans in the Ming dynasty.  In this immersive installation, the artist hand-carved over four thousand moveable type printing blocks.  The painstaking production process and the format of the work, arrayed like ancient Chinese classics, were such that the audience could not believe that these exquisite texts were completely illegible.  The work simultaneously entices and denies the viewer’s desire to read the work...

[T]he false characters “seem to upset intellectuals,” provoking doubt in established systems of knowledge.  Many early viewers would spend considerable time scrutinizing the texts, fixedly searching for genuine characters amidst the illegible ones.

The aftermath of the release of A Book from the Sky reminds me of an incident from my freshman lit class in college.  The professor, a well-meaning but very old-school gentleman named Dr. Fields, had us read Robert Frost's famous "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  Afterward, he read us a quote from an interview with Frost in which the poet was asked about symbolism in the poem.  Frost responded, basically, "There isn't any.  It's about a man stopping by woods on a snowy evening.  That's all."  But then Dr. Fields, wearing his most patronizing smile, said, "Of course, we know that a poet of Frost's caliber would not have a poem with no symbolic literary elements, so we will proceed to analyze the symbolism therein."

So the woo-woos have decided that "an artist of Xu's caliber would not have a 604-page book with no meaning at all," and have been trying since its release all the way back in 1991 to figure out what it "actually means."

Here are a few of the weirder claims I've seen:

• it's written in the script that was used in Atlantis and/or Lemuria, which is why we can't decipher it, because there aren't many Atlanteans or Lemurians around these days.
• the document was communicated to Xu in a series of dreams generated by telepathic aliens who are trying to pass along to humanity their superior wisdom.
• it's eeeeeeevil, and if we did translate it, it would release demons, and boy then we'd be sorry.
• it's somehow connected to other examples of asemic writing (writing that looks like it should be meaningful but isn't), like the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinianus, and maybe one of them holds the key to deciphering the others.

Okay, respectively:

• neither Atlantis nor Lemuria existed.  I keep hoping this particular nonsense will go away, but somehow it never does.
• if this is superior wisdom from telepathic ultra-powerful aliens, you'd think they'd communicate in a language humans actually could read.  Like, oh, I dunno, maybe Chinese, which Xu, being Chinese and all, just happens to be fluent in.
• at this point, I'm thinking releasing demons wouldn't be any worse than what we're currently dealing with, so as far as that goes, let 'er rip.  Bring on the demons.
• of course it's connected to other asemic writing, because... hang on to your hats, here... by definition none of it has meaning.  If it was decipherable, it wouldn't be asemic writing.  It would just be plain old writing.

For cryin' in the sink, y'all need to put more effort into your crazy claims.  Because these ones suck.

Me, I think A Book from the Sky is exactly what its creator claims it is -- a beautiful but meaningless art piece intended to poke fun at the art establishment and people who need to find meaning in everything.  As the famous line about Freudian symbolism goes, "Sometimes a banana is just a banana."

But that's never going to satisfy the woo-woos, because they (1) can't resist a mystery, and (2) never admit they were wrong about anything.  So I'm sure they'll keep plugging away at it, trying to figure out what Xu's work "actually means."

Oh, well.  As long as it amuses them.  And if it keeps them busy, they'll have less time to send spit-flecked emails to me about what a sheeple I am, so that's all good.

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