The Kickstarter Diaries 12: Gifts By Night

The latest in my tragicomic account of life behind the scenes during a crowdfunding campaign.

Lying awake at five a.m. thinking about crowdfunding is not all bad. There I was, staring up into the darkness, when the muted buzz of my phone told me a Facebook message had just come in. And what a message: it not only restored my belief in what I’m doing, it gave me my next major carving project to work on so I can take my mind off the rest of this campaign.

Here’s the backstory. Two remarkable but very modest young men, who don’t want their names publicised, are engaged in an amazing retrieval-and-restoration project involving long-dormant but amazingly ornate and beautiful scripts of southeast Asia. One of them finds inscriptions on statues, monuments, and temples in a wide variety of thousand-year-old scripts of the region, and deciphers them. The other takes this work and creates digital fonts so they can publish letter charts, examples of ornaments and decorations, and samples of text in those scripts.

Now, when I casually say “those scripts,” I am not doing justice to some of the most remarkable written forms the world has ever seen. The sinuous, serpentine figure in the photo, in the ancient Malay Sumatran script, is actually perhaps the most elaborate form of the Om ever written. It’s not just decoration, though: in an astonishing and long-dead practice, each of the curls is actually a voiced or meaningful component, but instead of being inscribed sequentially in the linear fashion we use, they are constructed in an almost architectural fashion with an eye to a graceful, flowing whole.

These guys are doing this amazing work as a kind of committed hobby. You can see their work HERE. The guy who sent me this image jokingly said “Maybe you carved it.” I misunderstood him; I thought he meant “Maybe you should carve it.” So I will. I’m buying a 100-year-old teak coffee table (teak coming from this southeast Asian region) and I’ll carve this extraordinary figure into the top, I thought, shutting my laptop again and closing my eyes.

Please support this work by pledging to my campaign HERE.