THE UNSCREEN

It is mostly thought of as background, behind the scenes, a mere substrate.

Yet without it, history itself would be unimaginable, creativity a mere hope.  What is it?  I am holding it in my hands right now as I read this.   It is nothing less than a piece of paper.

Until paper, books and manuscripts were written on a variety of coarser, more expensive, and less workable surfaces.  In ancient Egypt, papyrus was made of strips from the stem of the plant, woven together and pressed to make a flat surface.  In ancient Greece, parchment was introduced, made from animal skins that had been scraped, stretched, and chalked.  Silk in ancient China was woven from the fine thread of the silkworm.  Clever solutions all, but unforgiving materials that resisted the graceful gestures of the various tools of written language.

Paper may have been invented by an actual person.  His name was Ts’ai Lun and he lived in the first century in what is now China.  Ts’ai Lun was the chief eunuch and court officer under Emperor Ho-Ti of the Eastern Han Dynasty.  Using a ground mix of sesame fibers, tree bark, and hemp fibers, Ts’ai Lun created an early paper that was far more useable and available than any of the other materials.  His invention was so revolutionary that papermaking remained a state secret in China for hundreds of years.  It only slowly spread the East and then the West over the centuries.

The true magic of paper as you hold it in your hand is its solidity since there is no glue in the paper making process; the fibers stick to themselves when pressed.  Actually, any fibrous material will do.  Rice, wheat, straw, cotton, cornstalks, hemp, and jute have all been used.  But nothing works quite as well as the pulp from trees, which is first chemically or mechanically reduced to fibers, then cleaned, bleached, drained, and  pressed into sheets.

The first paper mill in the US was opened in Philadelphia in 1690 using rags, but in the mid-1800s a series of inventions for grinding logs into pulp and using sulfuric acid to separate the fibers marked the beginning of modern paper production.  We now produce more than 40 millions tons of the stuff each year.  As in every story of design, we have gone from one only-kind-there-is paper to an explosion of types, styles, weights, colors, textures, shapes, surfaces, thicknesses for an endless variety of uses.

Even as I hold this sturdy sheet in my hand, its very longevity is in question.  Will the digital revolution mark the end of paper?  Will screens replace it?  Not now, not ever.  Touching the page, rubbing it between my fingers, flicking the edge, feeling the surface – it is a lovely sheet of Arches cold-pressed watercolor paper – it is easy to see paper not as background to anything but as a sensual delight in its own right.  And to a writer or artist, nothing can compare with the allure of a sheet of it.  A blank screen is just empty; a blank piece of paper is a seduction.

There really is nothing quite like paper.  Skin with a memory, cloth that catches thoughts, archive of designs.  Nothing else like it.  And try making a flapping bird from a computer screen.