To write, to shrive
from the archive
As it is shrovetide this week, returning to an early essay about the tracks we leave in blank spaces, the spells cast.
I walk the same route most days with my dog, around a pond that lives amidst our neighborhood. I like the routine of it. Keeping familiarity with one route, the scope of focus becomes much smaller. I watch the level of the snow as it begins to melt and refreeze each day and night, notice the newly moose-browsed tree limbs, birds that occasionally come in abundance or are moving through. Drifts of snow moved back and forth by the wind, narrowing the path. And the many, many tracks that appear each day, a witness to the aliveness of many creatures spending time in the same place over the winter, or fresh from the night before. Boot tracks, fox, otter, moose (lots of moose), magpie, dogs. Tracks of former presence.
I was reading David Abrams’ book The Spell of the Sensuous, and have been thinking more about those tracks. He relays that Chinese tradition holds that the invention of writing began through observation of the tracks of birds—making copies of the tracks, to invoke the power of those animals.
He goes on to write that the alphabet we use —the name coming from the first letters of the Hebrew aleph and beth (which is reflected in Greek alpha and beta)—while it appears to be composed of abstract symbols instead of pictorial or figurative, it is still based in the world around us. In Hebrew, aleph is also the ancient word for ox; this became the symbol for A—which if turned upside down is roughly an ox’s head with horns. Abrams goes on to other examples:
The name of the Semitic letter mem is also the Hebrew word for “water;’ the letter, which later became our own letter M, was drawn as a series of waves…the letter ayin, which also means “eye” in Hebrew, was drawn as a simple circle, the picture of an eye; it is this letter, made into a vowel by the Greek scribes, that eventually became our letter O. The Hebrew letter qoph, which is also the Hebrew term for “monkey,” was drawn as a circle intersected by a long, dangling, tail. .. Our letter Q retains a sense of this simple picture.1
Reading that I can’t unsee it now—the animals staring up at us from the page. An embodiment speaking to us in what otherwise seems wholly abstract.
The word for “to write” in many Scandinavian and Germanic languages comes from the same root for shrive—to confess, repent, be absolved. In Old Saxon, the word for writing is scriban, in Norwegian, skrive, in Danish skrifte, meaning “confess.” Somewhere between skrive and shrive, there is a shared understanding of how the written word can be witnessed.
These roots of skrive come from an earlier borrowing from the Latin word for “to write,” scribere—which in turn comes from an even earlier proto-Indo-Europoean root, which means “to cut.” Which returns us back to the English “write”—in Old English writan—which in most Germanic-rooted languages also meant “to carve, scratch, cut.”
It starts to form a type of ouroboros—to cut, to confess, to write, to cut, ad infinitum. Like bird tracks in the snow or earth. Runes cut into stone or tree. To confess, be absolved—to cut into the ground the fact of ourselves, our beingness, and ask to be seen, witnessed. We confess our presence on the earth as we make tracks in the snow, or on the blank page—or papyrus stalks flattened and made into scrolls of our existence. We cut, write a confession, an offering.
I’ve been haunted by the library of scrolls from Herculaneum that I linked to last week—scrolls turned into charcoal that would collapse if touched. And yet there are digital ways that researchers can unfurl them while they remain intact—which honestly kind of blows my mind.
Whose names have been forgotten in those scrolls of papyrus, whose names might be recovered? Does it matter? What lock could be, well, unlocked in learning the words someone wrote down nearly two millennia ago? What spells could be unloosed into the world? Those words waiting to be unraveled remind me of a fragment of Sappho, written clumsily on a pottery shard by some unknown hand2:
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time. 
I imagine those scrolls from Herculaneum as widely as imagination will allow—wishing that they would be the lost works of Sappho no longer in fragments, whole and complete. Or the names of many other Greek and Roman women writers: Myrtis, Praxilla, Erinna, Anyte, Moero, Nossis, Corinna—or the famed Telesilla, whose works were renowned by other writers, but only nine fragments of her poetry are extant. What expanses of collective memory could be lurking in such lost ancient libraries, in such fragile papyrus.
Sappho also wrote this fragment3:
Come to me now: loose me from hard
care and all my heart longs
to accomplish, accomplish. You
be my ally.Loose me from hard care. You be my ally. Let me confess, and cut small tracks in this life. To be loosened from hard care, to be seen, heard, allied with. To be reminded that we are not in this life alone.
Abrams, David. 2017. The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books. p. 101
Carson, Anne. 2003. If Not, Winter. Vintage Books. p. 297
Ibid. p. 5
This is beautiful ❤️