I carved in wood the following statement: “Today, Angie was here. Make no attempt to follow. Find your own path to Krause’s class 
” I wanted to play with the stereotypical “So and so was here” and the “Make your own path” saying/proverb.
It’s silly, but it’s all I could think of at the time. It’s portable and fairly permanent and boy my hand still hurts from all that carving!
- I Went Old School
From Cave Drawings to Modern Convenience: I Now Know to Appreciate Them Both.
In order to create this project I first started thinking about how ancient peoples used to “tell” their stories. For some reason I kept coming back to the idea of cave drawings. While caves are hardly portable, the markings on them are clearly permanent because we can still see them today. I remembered back to when I lived in Las Vegas and I would hike the canyons and other nearby parks/deserts and there were always caves and rocks to climb and witness the ancient hieroglyphics of times past, not to mention, I have always been fascinated by the ancient Egyptians and the carvings on their pyramids. What they meant, I personally had no idea, but looking at them was a truly awe-inspiring thing. Wanting to replicate such an ancient form of writing is why I chose to carve into a piece of bark I found in the nearby woods (no worries, the bark came from a dead and downed tree that was being cut for fire wood).
I started carving into my original piece of wood with a sharp rock I found, but after about 20 minutes I knew this task would soon become about a week-long project at the pace I was going and decided to make a few changes. First of all, I swapped my larger piece of wood for one that was much smaller and easy to transport. Next, after seeing that carving with a rock would indeed work, I switched to a modern metal tool (one which I have no idea what the name if it is but it is very much like an arrow head, just made out of metal). I also heated the wood (without letting it catch fire) in order to soften the surface for carving. Although my writing tools and methodology worked, it was time consuming and painful on the hands and wrist.
This project made me realize that every modern day convenience that we take for granted was the result of someone else’s painstaking labor. They evolved out of the need for a faster, more convenient methodology. When creating my text. every word I carved seemed to count much more than the ones I am typing on this computer. As I went along I lived every word. I carved them deeper and deeper into the wood, feeling every curve of every letter and wanting them to be as perfect as I could craft them to be. I repeated the letter in my mind over and over, only focusing on “A” or “D” as I came to it. My mind did not have the chance to wander; it had to stay on task. Carving into wood made the alphabet come to life, it was like reliving my kindergarten experience of tracing my letters until they were perfect. In creating this piece, I also had to plan out exactly what I was going to say before I sat down to work. With such a small space every word had to contribute to the overall message of my text. There was no room for error or else I would have to start all over again, lest my message never be understood.
It made me think about the Reid piece when he was talking about how the ancient peoples used writing as a means of bartering and communication. Before symbolic language was a prominent part of society it was a part of a creative explosion, one that came from the needs of the people. Today, we are able to write anywhere, anytime, and about any subject we desire. Nothing is off limits. But when symbolic language first appeared, it had a specific purpose for the people. Although Plato and Ong may say that writing has decreased memorization and audience interaction, something that is down on paper can last for generations and lead people to new levels of awareness. Carved drawing tell of ancient civilizations, maps left of rawhides guided adventurers to new lands and treasures, and bits of wisdom carved into wood may have inspired regular people to become better human beings.
Without modern technologies to write with, the spreading of knowledge would be a much harder process and a task that very few people would be willing to embark upon. Writing is now a part of us and will continue to be, but as this project has shown, for those who came before us, it was a labor of love.
