Language of the Print

     I was delighted that BL took me to The Morgan Library this past weekend; I wanted to see the Jane Austen exhibit and was excited that I hadn't missed the Blake exhibit.  The two presentations work well together, though separated by floors and galleries.  I'm fairly sure the overlap was unintentional--but how unintentional can a curator be?  Blake used words as and for art; the letters made poems, the poems made an excuse for visual art.  Words, images, all lines imprinted on copper and paper.  Each without the other, less than what they can be.  As a printmaking student, I remember marveling at some reproduction Blake plates brought in by a guest teacher to demonstrate his singular technique.  I engraved, exposing my fine lines to an acid bath that cut into the metal and bit down on my images.  He did something called relief etching--an almost reverse of the traditional intaglio technique that burns an image into a metal plate.  His technique--and it was his, something he originated--etched out everything surrounding the image he wanted to print--raising it, cutting out, not in.    A much more demanding process than the already ambitious technique calls for: in printmaking, all letters, all images will appear in the reverse, and so his hand lettering, fine, and script-like, all composed backward and in relief--a double negative of the finished product.  Blake said "I curse and bless engraving alternately because it takes so much time and is so untractable, tho capable of so much beauty and perfection."  And what's also fascinating about his printmaking is that the labor of it is hidden in the often mythic and mystical poems and images.  There is an odd whimsy to what I see in his art, so disparate from its medium and its matter.
     On the second floor are framed works of a different art.  Austen knew her letter writing was an art--these were our movies, television, radio, records--and she employed the everday technique in her often epistolary novels.  I had an inclination recently to write to somone about the simple events of my day--not a blog, not a diary--an email letter recounting  my encounters of the day.  I felt silly for it.  But Austen bolstered my spirits a bit--"Important nothings" she called her missives.  And so they are--at least to me, and hopefully to the one you're writing.  I've always seen the written word as a visual art.  Austen's letters present interesting images apart from handwriting; paper, this rare commodity, not to be wasted, is traced with her words in all possible directions and corners so as not to let any fiber go blank.  Sentences are written vertically over those written horizontally like a finished crossword puzzle.  And in a corner of the gallery, a note she sent to her eight year old niece, written backward for the girl's amusement (it would have just bewildered, then angered me at eight).  I thought of Blake's prints, and paper, and words, of whimsy and tedious work. 
     On our way out, we stepped quickly into a small chamber displaying Puccini's handwritten scores, beautiful also apart from the music that could come from them; without paper and ink, where would we be?  Right here.