Last week, I wrote a post called “In Praise of Bibliomancy.”
That post was a toe-dip into into the deep waters collecting at the middle of a Venn diagram of three ideas: 1) that written culture cannot exist without copying, both as practice and as pedagogy; 2) that memoir and auto-fiction rely on creating a written copy of lived experience; and 3) you can draw on random written works and follow the passages of text that you respond to, as a means to suggest a particular path in your writing.
When I first drew the first seven texts of my new bibliomancy practice, I realized that it felt really good. And this post is dedicated to why.
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Interspersed in this post are three passages from texts that I drew from my first shelf of books that I keep at home in the study.
There are other differences in power here. First, epistemic power. Kincaid knows how to read in a way that makes reading meaningful; the student lacks, but wants to have, this power. Part of what is particularly disturbing about Kincaid’s reading of the letter is that the student is not intellectually sophisticated. Kincaid’s calling her “perceptive” feels manipulative and cruel, giving her a simulacrum of what she wants — the teacher’s own mastery. Indeed, Kincaid only reproduces the latter, presumably without her permission, because he is confident that she isn’t the type to read Critical Inquiry. But what if she did read it? How might she be expected to feel, seeing her youthful earnestness exhibited as a sexual trophy?
Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. First paperback edition. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. p. 134.
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I used to try start the day by drawing on a single tarot card and referring to The Creative Tarot for guidance, but I stopped the practice, largely because I would grow to dread it for fear of pulling a reversed card or something else that was anxiety producing.
But I still like the idea of starting the day with something random and possibly uplifting to inform my otherwise regular and uninteresting morning routine. I suspect that one of the reasons why so many of us start the day with a quick peek at Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky (or even the news), is so that we can start it with novelty or some of kind of portent that might keep us safe.
When you hear that a company like DuPont has cut its emissions of cancer-causing chemicals like DuPont has cut its emissions of cancer-causing chemicals by almost 70 percent since 1987, you feel better. Eco-efficient industries can do something good for the environment, and people can feel less fearful about the future. Or can they?
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002.
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I keep my bookshelves within my line of sight in both my home and work office. When I write, I will find myself taking a break from typing and to gaze upon the colourful array of my bookshelves. Sometimes a book title will suggests a connection between what I have read in the past and what I am writing in the present. But as I am currently in my fifties, I am very aware that I have forgotten more than I have can remember about the contents of all those books that have shaped me.
This is the reason why I have come to really love the practice of bibliomancy: it is a practice that re-introduces myself to the books that I have bought, and it re-animates my writing with ideas that I’ve already responded to and may have forgotten.
It is difficult to convey to a young person how much you will forget about what you read over the years. Lucky for us there is a whole cottage industry of Roman-empire-loving influencers dedicated to convincing young people to keep a record of what they read and to sell them a series of six courses for $1500 $499 to teach them how to keep notes as they go as a form of PKM – personal knowledge management.
To optimize our lives, we feel compelled to spend an inordinate amount of time setting up “systems” to get things written, to get things read. (Side-note: I recently downloaded Readwise, the software that Luigi Mangione, the alleged CEO shooter, was apparently a user and fan of. Readwise promises AI-generated summaries and spaced-repetition to minimize the time spent reading and maximize retention.) All this time bookmarking, all this time surfing, all this time sharing, all this time clicking, all this time moving an article from the browser to an app and from an app to another app, but no time — how weird — for reading books. “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” as some Romantic once opined in a poem with far too many words.
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I have tried using spaced repetition using the Anki app to help me remember the facts that people expect me to know off the of my head, but I can’t bring myself to use it daily. Personally, I find it difficult to use a test-preparation tool for my ordinary life. The goal of memorization is less attractive to me than the promise of surprise and the potential of connection.
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Amy doesn’t get my joke, which is not surprising for a woman who doesn’t think our family is funny. “We almost lost her, Gilbert.”
“Yep, I know.”
Momma snores and snorts, and with each burst of sound, Amy seems to feel better and better.
The TV is on but the sound is down.
“Hey,” I say. “Let’s turn off the TV. It needs a rest.” Our TV plays around the clock.
“Momma likes the light. Helps her sleep.”
“Fine, okay, whatever.”Hedges, Peter, and Gilbert Grape. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Paperback ed., [Nachdr.]. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
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You can also use bibliomancy as it was originally intended: as a means of divination. From Wikipedia:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,[1] the word bibliomancy (etymologically from βιβλίον biblion- ‘book’ and μαντεία -manteía ‘divination by means of’) “divination by books, or by verses of the Bible” was first recorded in 1753 (Chambers’ Cyclopædia). Sometimes this term is used synonymously with stichomancy (from στίχος stichos- ‘row, line, verse’) “divination by lines of verse in books taken at hazard”, which was first recorded c. 1693 (Urquhart‘s Rabelais).
I have to come to believe that bibliomancy can work as a divination tool. Not because the practice generates vibrations of reality-altering manifestation, but because the drawing cards or text can act as a form of priming that will suggest possible novel connections between what you’ve drawn and what you’ve read or what you will read next.
Here’s an example. Last week, I drew seven texts from my work bookshelves, including this text:
A rare example of a well-defined, useful, but noncomputable problem is the halting problem. Imagine that I want to write a computer program and determine whether or not that program will eventually stop. If the program being examined has no loops or recursive subroutine calls, it is bound to finish eventually, but if it does have such constructs the program may well go on forever. It turns out that there is no algorithm for examining a program and determining whether or not it is fatally infected with an endless loop. Moreover, it’s not that no one has yet discovered such an algorithm; rather, no such algorithm is possible. The halting problem is noncomputable.
Hillis, W. Daniel. The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work. 1st ed. Science Masters. New York: Basic Books, 1998, p. 68.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article from 404 Media:
A pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. The program, called Nepenthes after the genus of carnivorous pitcher plants which trap and consume their prey, can be deployed by webpage owners to protect their own content from being scraped or can be deployed “offensively” as a honeypot trap to waste AI companies’ resources.
From what I have learned from my bibliomancy exercise, is that there is no computational algorithm that can predict if a program is infinite. This is why Nepenthes is “is less like flypaper and more like an infinite maze holding a minotaur, except the crawler is the minotaur that cannot get out.”
What separates people from computational systems is our ability to perceive the infinite.
Not only a idea that I would not likely have come to if it wasn’t for this exercise. And if this reason isn’t enough, here’s my last reason why should consider the practice bibliomancy: it is a great excuse to buy more print books. 📖📖📖