My notebooks are a collection of thoughts about a dictionary. Nine years ago I worked as a citation checker for the Oxford English Dictionary. My job was to locate certain phrases in pre-1530's texts in the Bodliean library. As I carried out this meticulous and solitary work I slowly came to comprehend the intricacies of the huge language machine that is the dictionary. It amazed me. I have been thinking about it ever since. The dictionary is a vast and labyrinthine structure that traverses time. It is a living architecture whose forms are bound together by a mesh of etymologies, cross-references, mutations and subdivisions. These rear up, proliferate crazily, and then appear to crumble, like the planet that Lem describes in Solaris. The notebooks are a residue of my attempt to create physical structures, sculptures, that are generated by following the life of a word. This self-appointed project of mine, to work with the idea of a dictionary, of life as an immense and impenetrable dictionary, produces very few objects or products. It produces a huge amount of working out. Each decision in the sculpture has to be predicated on a piece of information about a word as the dictionary records it. In any serious study, the closer one looks at a subject, the more vertiginously, wonderfully complex it is found to be. Language is so complex and unstable as to defy sense. The dictionary does not impose order upon the chaos of living. It is beautiful because it glorifies that chaos. |
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