We are bound to each other

I.

Despite the solitary appearance of most art practices, art has always been communal. Consciously or otherwise, inspiration is drawn from the unique history, wounds, and circumstances of one’s community. Every piece of art is imbued with this inevitable context full of people beyond its creator: the chemists who synthesized paint, the loggers who cut pulp wood for paper, the mother who would bring coffee or tea, the former lover whose silhouette would become the central image of a sketch, the political leaders whose censorship would become the parameters of a poem. The completed work is then perceived, judged, consumed, remembered by another. It may be transformed, passed on, critiqued to shreds, rendered sacred, condemned for heresy. Artists and writers have never been alone in their pursuits.

Back in March, when local book artist Meredith Miller of Punchpress Studio asked me and my workshop classmate J— if we would be interested in an experimental bookbinding residency, neither of us hesitated to say yes. J— and I met at a non-adhesive bookbinding workshop Meredith held in January, and from an easy bond and our enthusiasm, a spark was lit. Meredith then proposed having monthly meetings over the summer to work on a book or print project while she would serve as a guide, printing tech, and extra pair of hands.

A force of creation

Honoring the wisdom of the body, and other lessons from bookbinding

semper feminaLian Sing

Meredith had her reasons: a schedule that would hold herself and other people accountable to a creative summer project, an opportunity to connect with artists from various backgrounds, and a trial run of an idea that contributes to the development of book arts in Austin.

Mine are obvious. I would have the rare opportunity to learn from a master of the craft, and to carve out time and space in my regular routine for inspiring, creative work. The residency’s timing was serendipitous. My job then — which I left a few weeks ago — had been progressively becoming unbearable, and it was these monthly meetings that would revive me from a growing sense of purposelessness. Transforming sheets of paper into a book is nothing short of a magical feat, and these sessions would remind me of my capacity for creation.

Over the summer, the three of us would gather at her workshop to huddle over the large workstation at the center of the room. The cutting mats, bone folders, and pencils would already be neatly prepared by the time J— and I would arrive. Before discussing our project proposals, Meredith first equipped us with a few more skills we could use for our projects: the double fan binding method, letterpress printing. I ended up incorporating both into my final output, which was an artist copy of my unpublished poetry manuscript. I developed four different prototypes before settling on its final form: a do si do variation.

The residency culminated on a hot August day. J— brought a dozen copies of her book on her grandfather’s oeuvre, which she then collated and bound at the workshop. All of my final hours, meanwhile, went into printing my book covers on the Vandercook letterpress, which was wonderfully time-consuming and meditative. Between the measuring, typesetting, printing, and cleaning, I scarcely had time to proceed with binding a copy. I had anticipated this, and was prepared to complete the process by myself at home.

When most of our day-to-day actions are driven by external motivations and productive outcomes — the need to make a living, the pressure to meet quotas — the creative freedom in a residency like this was dizzying and revitalizing, especially because we did not do it alone. There was no external deadline to meet. No one was grading our work. Our decision to show up every month wasn’t hinged on the threat of punishment or promise of compensation. We traded in an invisible currency that LinkedIn or HR departments don’t recognize. Our coming together felt like a creative companionship, an artistic entanglement, where our ideas were given space to play and collide. We talked about archiving work, theater and photography, different kinds of paper, finding a good printer, a fossil Meredith found in her backyard, mailing clubs, an easy chickpea recipe, cultivating a political life with our sanity intact. The book output was really just an anchor. The architecture of the residency — the physical and non-physical spaces, the collaborative process, the exercise in commitment — was, to me, the point.

I believe in the profound importance of community spaces like this in nudging emergence and co-creation. Our brief, colorful collision will echo unpredictably and surprisingly in the coming years; of that I am certain, and for it eternally grateful.

II.

The idea of this collision echo requires an openness towards mystery. A kind of faith. These echoes have, potentially, grander implications than simply being evidence of pattern in a human life. I don’t only wonder, what kind of woman will this decision make me? but also, what kind of world does this endorse, now and in the future? Sartre writes:

When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.

Distantly, this also reminds me of quantum entanglement, which Einstein aptly (though dismissively) described as “spooky action at a distance”: the phenomenon when a pair of quantum particles are linked in such a way that the state of one particle simultaneously and instantaneously influences the other, regardless of distance. What happens to particle A on Earth influences what happens to particle B on the moon. This is, of course, a simplistic definition, but I am fascinated by the scientific revelation that at the mysterious quantum level, there are real, immediate connections that transcend locality. (I know, I know; philosophizing scientific theory is tricky territory prone to errors and leaps in logic. Indulge me. I write poetry for a reason.)

The interdependence I illustrated at the beginning isn’t entanglement, but at both levels I see the same message: we are all bound to each other. I don’t know in what ways my little life is entangled with yours, but I believe that choices I make, even in the solitude of my home, create ripples that affect much more beyond my immediate circles, and often in ways I don’t realize. There are the grand gestures — what I vote for and speak up against, what I patronize or protest — but everything carries significance. I know it matters that I continue to write in English, or that I hand bound copies of my unpublished manuscript, or that I laugh off an insult against my person when I should have shown my teeth. The words I use in my essays matter, as does the skirt I wear and the media I immerse myself in. The inscribed values, both obvious and subliminal, seep into us, finding their way into our gestures and utterances. This is why I think the saying it’s not that deep is a kind of cowardice; it masks our fear of responsibility beyond ourselves (a burden the existentialists describe as anguish). It is hyperindividualism’s blessing of blissful ignorance. Without having to even intellectualize, everything is that deep. The invisible threads that bind us to one another thrum with every decision, holding us together as we shape our shared fates. Misguided or not, I do what I do because I love myself as I love you. As love can be passed on, so too can cruelty and malice and sloth, morphing into monsters no one wants to claim. My hands are not clean, nor are yours, but only with them can we make something resembling redemption. I’m painfully aware of this. Acting on this awareness while relieving myself of guilt that never belonged to me in the first place is the best, for now, that I can do.

As I fold folios and print unrevised poems and mail them out to my embarrassingly short mailing list, I make a case for the real, the tactile, the vulnerable, the intimate. I don’t want us to lose this important, beautiful thing, so I hold on.

Join my mailing club

In case you missed it: my epistolary zine project, EPISTOLARIA, will now be mailed via post monthly to project subscribers. The subscription includes the letter, a custom print/bookmark/postcard, and postage (domestic and international).

Born out of a desire to connect beyond the digital and revive the delight of the tactile, EPISTOLARIA (from epistolary, which pertains to letter writing) is a monthly zine project by Lian Sing. Each issue, mailed at the end of each month, may contain a short essay, printed poems, handwritten notes, prints, sketches, bookmarks, among other paper paraphernalia.

Paid subscribers to my Substack newsletter receive access to digital copies of the zine. Please consider signing up, or pass it on to someone who loves letters and paper as much as I do!

Exercises in Friction series

• Issue #1, on music: “For friction to occur, one object must be in contact with another. It does not happen in solitude. In an age of increasing isolation and individualism, friction has become an unwanted thing, but I realize now that in evading it much has been lost. The occasional commentary in between songs, once a feature I may have found annoying, is now a welcome breath of fresh air. A reminder that, while bobbing my head to a song, I am not alone.”
• Issue #2, on boredom: “There are a thousand ways to be creative, and being bored, I am learning, is one of them. It sets the space for the mind to wander without the barricades of physicality or a prompt or deadline. Wandering can take the form of daydreams, people-watching, meditation. It can be observing the manner in which my cat cleans himself, which begins at his shoulder and ends at his stretched paws.”
• Issue #3, on relationships & intimacy: “A relationship is an everyday marvel. In the collision of two wholly different worlds — each with its own perspectives and mannerisms and histories — something is transformed. The subjects themselves change, and often, the collision changes everything else, too: family dynamics, institutional hierarchies, culture, finances, opportunities, purpose. I see now how sublime it is that we can know one another, and meet the world not alone, but together. This, to me, is too important to make frictionless. To automate, or somehow make easy.”
• Issue #4, on being lost: “I’d look at the forest I’m lost within and project all my fears and expectations upon the trees, when, all this time, I could be studying the patterns of light, listening for the sound of a stream, building myself shelter to sleep under. I’d follow an impulse to keep walking blindly because shouldn’t I have found the trail by now, when anywhere I am is the trail. This inwardness could be mistaken for individualism, but through it I have found my way back into the world, clearer and with a surer stride, through the porosity I came to find. The strength of my shoulders, the migration of birds, desert architecture, the difference between right and wrong, monuments of a revolution — these belong to the same image, after all.”