writing

Maybe We Should Be Copying

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Think about how much of human knowledge was dependent on Some Person With A Pen. Before the internet, before the printing press, there was Person With A Pen copying books stroke by stroke, word by word.

Even as technology advanced, Person With A Pen was important (and after a point, Person With A Typewriter). Print shops, printing devices might be carefully controlled by the government or just unavailable due to cost. Person With A Pen was there, and knowledge continued outside of official sources.

Others might have copied things for which a printing press might be excessive. Among my library of Taoist literature is a book on massage and energy exercises called Immortal Fang’s Longevity Quigong. The original book is rather small and illustrated, so people passing around these exercises might find it easier to copy them. The book seemed to have been passed among friends, so that was probably the norm.

There are doubtlessly many motivations for Person with a Pen, but one common thing they all share is that they are getting very intimate with a book. Imagine what it’s like to copy a book, how it sits in your head, how it’s burned into your mind. Imagine what it’s like to do it more than once.

It has to drive the knowledge into your head, to make you understand it more. I’ve often heard stories of people borrowing books to copy them, some people making both a copy for themselves and another for someone else. Imagine what it’s like for religious and spiritual professionals to copy a holy text, the words settling into their souls.

Now of course it’s usually easy to get books. If it’s not in stock you can probably get it print on demand or find it used. Looking at my own library I’m grateful for how many people made this possible.

But, and you can guess where I’m going, I wonder if maybe some of us spiritual and religious types should give copying a book a shot now and then.

I’ve thought of doing this with a few Taoist works – at the top of the list are The Secret of the Golden Flower and maybe a composite of my favorite Tao Te Ching translations. Even typing them up – let alone writing them – would make me evaluate words, remember them, live them. I wonder what I’d learn, retain, and feel if I just copied some of the worlds that have influenced me.

I’m not sure I’d do it, but hey three years ago I wasn’t thinking of zines.

Maybe it’s an exercise some of us should try. Imagine taking time, like a weekend away, just to copy a spiritual work that’s important to you. Imagine reliving the role of Person With a Pen and connecting not just to the work in question, but with our history.

–Xenofact

Good for the Spirit, Good for the Mind

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As I write this there’s a huge, understandable panic that AI is being used by students so much they don’t know how to read and analyze it. If you are reading this in a future years removed from this essay, I hope you live in a world where AI isn’t such a concern, and you’reNOTin some post-apocalyptic disaster.

Anyway, whatever your chronological state, here in 2025 it’s been quite a concern. If you let AI write for you, analyze for you, etc. you are essentially outsourcing your thinking and your humanity. You will not develop skills you need to read books and understand things, and the skills you do have will decay.

This in turn made me think about spiritual and philosophical writing and how it trains you to read, analyze and understand. For the sake of brevity to encompass such things for self-development I shall call them spiritual works here.

When we sit down with a spiritual work we are attempting to contemplate, grow, and understand some very serious issues. We bring to it a desire to understand and grow, to engage with the work. The attitude of becoming involved in the work is there at the start.

In turn, the engagement is needed.

Spiritual works are about deep issues, and you will find yourself pausing to contemplate and analyze. We’ve all experienced moments where a paragraph or a page can hold our attention for a half hour. In spiritual works, you may find yourself going over something word by word just thinking what it means.

Spiritual works often use symbolism and metaphor as that may be easy to communicate complex truths, represent the otherwise indescribable, or lead you around a bit to help you learn. Symbolism also helps you think, how the symbols work together, what they really mean, and so on. Again, you are engaged with the work, connected to it.

Finally, many spiritual works are often grounded in a place, a person, an experience, a lineage, etc. To engage with spiritual work is to engage with much more than a book or a menial or a series of poems – it’s to learn about who produced it and the situation that led to it. One small book can lead you to a world of context – and a greater point of view.

Reading a good spiritual work teaches you to read, analyze, understand. A person with an interest about such issues can, in time, give themselves ersatz literary training. I once read a book called DIY MFA about how a person can read and write and analyze to gain similar experiences to getting an MFA – and that feels very familiar in spiritual writing.

So in a world of AI writing and AI reading, remember our spiritual pursuits. Sitting down with a book on philosophy or meditation or metaphysics isn’t just enriching morally or spiritually – it’s enriching literately. Your wrestling with ethics or breath meditation or divinities also helps you learn to read, analyze, and understand.

Just another reason to do it, I suppose.

-Xenofact

Hand The Book Across Time

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There are tales I’ve heard about Chinese scholars hiding their books in the walls of their home. Barring a fire, and even then, their writings would be be preserved. As I look at our troubled world here in the 21st century, I can understand that mindset. I die, the book lives on.

There’s something about humans saving knowledge.

We transmit stories by tales and song and riddles. We handed off culture in a marathon race among minds before we could write. What words and stories that are in your brain have passed on in some permutation since our ancestors hunted with stone-tipped spears?

How many archaeological digs find caches of wisdom? Scrolls in pots, carefully preserved bamboo strips, lovingly hidden paper, passionately engraved stone. Untold millions of people leaving behind their knowledge.

Then there are the transcriptionists and later the press. People copying book after book after book, at first by hand, then by block and plate, and today by computer and printer. There are people who’s lives are just the transmission or keeping of documents.

Think of the humorous findings by translators and relic-hunters, things preserved because people just keep records. How the internet laughs at terrible copper merchant Ea-Nasir. How we laugh in agreement at young Japanese Emperor Uda lovingly writing about his cat. Humans just keep records, and those so often outlive us – and today we shake our head at that merchant or pet our cat and feel connected to the ruler of a country long dead.

When evil threatens, we hide and preserve and transmit and print. For all that is lost to history, to time, to paper that frays and ink that fades, we have saved so much. We have opposed tyrants and we have avoided censorship, often at the cost of lives. We will die – or kill – to save information.

There is something so human in preserving the word. Something that is transcendent of the individual. To be human is to be information, to be transmission. The you that you are now, the me that I am now, are just momentary permutations of something much larger.

When I look at the world and all its suffering and problems, then back to all these singers and writers and printers, I think I understand. We’ve all been handing things off down the line since we could first think and communicate. Even as we find new ways to burn our planet and destroy each other, that urge lives on.

We hide the book in the walls, we sing the song, for that will build or save the future despite the present.

–Xenofact