Been thinkin’ about…Ink, stone, magic

"Lithography began in the late 17th century," my professor is saying while writing the words "Bavaria," and "limestone" on the white board. "'Lithos'" means 'stone' in Greek." Outside, the afternoon sun is bright, air dry in the September light. I am in Graphic Arts 110, sitting in a classroom surrounded by Mac computers. The smell of photographic developer fluid drifts through the space. In the big room beyond are the big presses and a paper cutter that could have served as a guillotine during the French Revolution.

My introduction to graphic arts had begun the June before when I enrolled — without fully knowing why — in a class simply titled "Desktop Publishing 101." The class was compressed, three full credit hours of study, crammed tidily into 10 days. Unlike this classroom, that classroom was dark and cool, a reserved hanger bay of gray carpet and off-white office dividers. The Mac lab shared the room with CAD-CAM. Strange to think those boys in the CAD-CAM lab, locked in time and space in a spare memory of mine, are now men in their 40s and 50s.

Lithography, stone, typography, the printing press, Gutenberg — this was all new and strange and I strangely loved it. There was magic in typography, magic in words and something echoing, Western civilization summated in the simple idea of a printing press. The sharing of words, of ideas, of classical design. Dr. Hinkle put an image of early lithographic prints on the monitors overhead, all fine classical lines, as well the image of a big block of limestone. Here there was permanence yet fluidity, an idea that called.

Earlier that summer I had felt similarly, watching the sun's lily pad descent over a small Iowa lake, my back to an anachronistic Art Deco "lodge," more of an almost-fortress. The Lake Wapello Beach House was built in the 1930s by the "Civilian Conservation Corp," also known at the time as the "CCC boys." The CCC boys were commissioned during the Great Depression, giving government work to men who would have otherwise been unemployed after Wall Street crashed, all part of Roosevelt's New Deal. The CCC boys once spent a summer in what would become Stephens State Forest, surveying the rugged forest ridges, likely unaware that my grandma and her sisters were watching them like a bunch of forest rabbits. After the "boys" went home for the night, my grandma and her sisters ran down through the forest, pulling up survey stakes and throwing them away.

Hillbilly independence dies hard.

The sky over Lake Wapello turns from orange to purple to indigo, late summer night breeze brushes the purple coneflower blossoms. The "pueblo" style beach house's limestone walls whispered things in my mind — and now in my memory. There were things here, old things, things tied to the land but also to a classical past, a past when things were built forever and meant to last. Legacy is powerful, whether in word or stone. Somewhere a fish jumps. The yellow paddle boats are back in their stalls, bobbing gently near the cattails. The children are done playing, a few remaining families eating cheeseburgers. The smell of fries and barbecue wafts about.

The turn of a century, the turn of a millennium. I was young then, and full of half-hoped ideas. But deep down, I understood there was power churning up from the deep, a new kind of printing press, a new force in a strange space in which there were not quite words or descriptions. That idea gave me hope. I had grown up in a world in which one grew up to become certain "things." Things like "engineer," "doctor," lawyer," "teacher," "farmer." Those words held no magic for me, I could see no future in them, only expectation met for someone else.

"Josh, you need to learn something that is all yours, something no one else in the family knows." The words were, characteristically, wise, and still rest in the back of my mind. Later I learned that my path of art and writing and publishing embraced a form of the Magician archetype, a traditional masculine archetype. According to Jungian authors Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, there are four traditional masculine archetypes (an archetype is a universally understood symbol, pattern or original model). The other three archetypes are King, Warrior and Lover. The Magician, when expressed well, knows the esoteric things, can do things that others cannot, to help those around him. When the archetype goes bad, well, it's bad. Think Gandalf versus Saruman.

There is magic in the goodness of secret knowledge, used well.

"This is Franklin Gothic," my professor is saying and I, an unsure, skinny, dark-haired, dark-eyed 19-year-old quickly writes down "Franklin Gothic" in my notebook. The font style is magic, the blocky lines of a childhood story book, a lineage of books, of classical design, of the West. "So this is how we make things," I think to myself.