On Stichomancy
Divination by verse
I have a funny obsession with learning words about divination. For example, ornithomancy is the practice of reading the future from birds. Tasseography is the divination from tea leaves. In Slovakia, there is custom of molybdomancy, which is the divination from reading molten lead.
On St. Andrew’s Day, November 30th, women would melt lead, poor it in the water to cool, and the shape was said to represent their future husband. I’m not sure if it is practiced so much anymore much to the detriment of molybdomancy societies everywhere.
Stichomancy is divination by verse. It is the act of opening a random book, a poetry book for example, and interpreting a divine message. There is also bibliomancy, which seems related.
Physical poetry books lend themselves well to stichomancy because poetry books are reference manuals for life.
For example, I just picked up my Kabir book translated by Robert Bly and opened to this:
If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth:
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is
inside you.
The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to
himself,
and he is the one who has made it all.I am not a Stichomancer, I just enjoy this particular line of nerd-word-fun. I do believe that poetry books can change your life though, because one did for me. For me, it was Sleepers Joining Hands by Robert Bly.
This copy is tattered and faded. Published in 1973, this book contains the poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, which is the poem that made me a poet. When I recall parts of that poem, my brain goes back to this personal copy of this book. I can visualize where on the page a verse is. Even when I read prose, I often can recall where on a page something was. My mind will go, “Oh that was on the bottom of a left page.” Unfortunately, I typically don’t remember the page number.
For Wasted Blood, which should hit doorsteps today or tomorrow, the design goal was to make a book that is defiantly analog1. The previous post, we talked about the blood stains. But let me show you what else we did.
A poetry notebook
The overall design aesthetic for Wasted Blood is that of a notebook. In WWI, which is the time period The Bloody Sonnets were written, some of the most famous war poetry was written, in the field, on notebooks.
For some poets today, the notes app has replaced the notebook. We need not be nostalgic about notebooks, because they still exist — just like cassettes. As Marshall McLuhan says, we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. I don’t believe one to be better than the other. But, choosing a tool does shape how you perceive the world. If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail for example. The notebook requires no power, is absolutely offline, easily modified, and allows the uses of any pen — it’s not restricted to say the apple pen.
A notebook should be small. If it’s too big and heavy it is not portable and it will stay on the desk. And by doing so, it will get dirty, bend, and develop a patina. To me, these are features, not bugs as they say in the tech industry. To get this patina, we requested the cover be matte instead of gloss. The designer, No Good Kid (NGK), had to tell the print shop that yes, that is not a mistake, we purposely want a matte cover.
Like the Field Notes brand of notebooks, this is the idea I had in my head. NGK on the other hand, thought of Jess Mariano from Gilmore Girls. Apparently, he was hot and would always carry poetry books in his back pocket. I have not seen the show. But if any of you are Gilmore Girls fans, here is a back pocket shot of Wasted Blood.
John Minahane’s The Bloody Sonnets, which I absolutely recommend is something like 11 inches by 6. (279x152mm). But I don’t have a pocket that big. So we went with a size that is 120x175mm (4.7x6.9 inches).
I have had my copy for about a week and it is already scuffed, bent, and worn and it looks beautiful.
But NGK took the book to the next level with the following addition. Notebooks invite doodling, since unlike a smartphone, a notebook is rather boring. But sometimes, the world is more boring than a notebook. One of the phrases we’d say in the military was hurry up and wait. Most of military life is not the rah-rah of shooting guns, it is simply waiting. It is 95% boredom with 5% terror.
So NGK added a doodle. A doodle that someone might draw between the shells or waiting for a submarine to get to the next waypoint. Let my daughter demonstrate it for you:
In the corner of the book, NGK added a flipbook animation. In gif form, it looks like this:
After people have enjoyed the physical version I will release the digital version as pay-what-you-want. The sky is the limit for what I will accept but I will also accept 0. The Bloody Sonnets are a significant cultural artifact for Slovakia. Unfortunately, not enough people know about them. With a pay-what-you-want pricing model, I am ensuring that price and physical distance will not be a factor in reading what I believe are life-changing poems about war. I also make it very clear in this book I am standing on John Minahane’s broad shoulders so hopefully he gets more attention as well.
The digital version is lacking the blood, the feel, the back pocket companionship, and you can not run your thumb over the corner to produce the flip book.
But the digital version is beautifully typeset and designed. I understand we are in a digital age now and I think the pdf will be enjoyed tremendously by those that like a good pdf of a book. Many people on substack provide pdfs of their poems beautifully set and it is often better than reading on the default screen.
There will be an unlimited number of perfect copies for the digital version. This will include the audio even.
But, I entered this world in a past age. I enjoy vinyl records, cassettes, used books, and the exchange of physical cash. And despite this wonderful digital platform, which I’m very thankful of, I know some of you are like me. This physical book was made for you.
As I flip through the book now, my thumb unconsciously wills the pages to stop on page 36. For all the stichomancers out there, here is the line that called to me:
Who will sing songs about blood?
To order Wasted Blood, send send at least $40 to Josh Datko, PO Box 273029, Fort Collins, CO 80527-3029. Include your return address. If you are international to the United States and want a physical copy, contact me.
I’m pretty sure it was Luciana Moroianu who planted this phrase in my head.
Lots of good stuff here. Interesting bit at the beginning on different divination practices.
I like how stichomancy is framed here less superstitious and more as a way of being "talked to". The Kabir passage especially makes it feel less like “predicting” and more like listening for something. Something about interior readiness.
I do a rough version of this with clipped magazine words and let the powers that be choose the message. Think I'll be refering to that as Trash - o - mancy from now on...
very cool stuff!!