Writing in rope

Quipu (Khipu), Incan empire, approximately 1400-1532 CE
Museum of World Cultures, Göteborg, Sweden

I am fascinated with methods other than writing that people have retained ideas, text, and oral tradition.  One of the most fascinating is through the use of knots to record ideas and texts—a technique commonly used in the Inca empire and the South Pacific.  What is perhaps even more fascinating is that now, we are left with these intricately knotted ropes, and no one understands how they were meant to be read.  They just remain as mute artifacts, speaking in a language that no one can yet unravel. 

For more pictures of Quipu/Khipu from the Harvard Khipu Database, click here.
From about.com

Quipu (also spelled khipu or quipo) is the only known precolumbian writing system in South America—well, perhaps writing system isn’t quite the correct phrase. But quipus were clearly an information transmittal system. A quipu is essentially a group of wool and cotton strings tied together. The strings are dyed in many different colors, and they are joined together in many different manners and they have a wide variety and number of knots tied in them. Together the type of wool, the colors, the knots and the joins hold information that was once readable by several South American societies.

Quipus were a tool used by the Inca empire to communicate some kinds of information throughout the Inca Empire. When they arrived in 1532, the Spanish conquistadors viewed the quipu with great suspicion. Thousands of quipus were destroyed in the 16th century. […]

Quipus have not yet been deciphered, but some educated guesses about what they represent have been attempted. Certainly they were used for administrative tracking of tributes. They may have represented maps of the ceque system and/or they may have been mnemonic devices to help oral historians remember ancient legends.

The British poet George Ttoouli wrote this lovely introduction to the Tada Chimako poems on Poetry International Web. 

Poetry, of all the modes of verbal expression, is where people take refuge in times of need. And people should not need to take refuge in these places out of necessity. It should be a choice, one that, when engaged with willingly, allows for aesthetic consideration, for the kind of luxurious experimentation and testing of the self that Tada Chimako’s poetry displays so brilliantly.

From Japan’s domain, then, comes a poet who seemed to have ridden the wave of a localised, deeply personal late modernist mode. Chimako’s poetry is beautifully crafted, delivered to an international audience through Jeffrey Angles’ precise, careful renditions. It is hard to tell what is lost in the conveyance, for the results are so striking and fresh, so deeply layered, despite the fact that some of the poems were written four or five decades ago.

What comes across above all is how Chimako infused an alien atmosphere into familiar imagery; she applied razor-sharp metaphor to common objects to create what my limited understanding of Japanese aesthetics would describe as yugen. Loosely speaking, this manifests as a kind of philosophical awareness, or spiritual realisation, arising from a profound sense of mystery:

I am planted in the earth
Happily, like a cabbage
Carefully peel away the layers of language
That clothe me and soon
It will become clear I am nowhere to be found
And yet even so, my roots lie beneath …

from (‘Myself’)

The point at which the poet can make that leap, from a more familiar poetic territory – of self and metaphysics – to a sense of oblivion and tradition walking hand in hand, is wonderfully smooth. This kind of deep thinking and simple expression comes from the contemplative space granted to poets by their social circumstances.

As Angles writes in his introduction, Chimako “spent most of her career working at the edge of the Japanese poetic world … in relative isolation”; though her situation often brought a degree of sadness, “it was also fruitful, as it encouraged her to think independently and allowed her to work in ways that did not necessarily parallel the quickly shifting trends of the capital”. Poets, everywhere, depend upon this ability to step back, think independently, and then decide when and how best to speak to their communities, from their experience and understanding of the world.