Zomi watched as Elder Comi and Luan Zya took turns shaping the clay and carving them into speech. Elder Comi’s sight was failing, and so he read Luan’s replies by caressing the logograms gently, using his fingers as eyes.
“What does that first logogram you wrote say?” whispered Zomi.
“What does it look like?” asked Luan, taking a sip from his teacup. “Oh, this plum-morning-orchid infusion is wonderful. I’ve missed it.”
The logogram was simple: a squat cone with three peaks poking up at the top. “A small mountain?” said Zomi, her voice betraying some trepidation.
“That’s right; that’s the logogram for mountain, which is read as yeda in Ano. What about the next one?”
Encouraged by the success, Zomi looked at the next square in the tray with more confidence. This logogram was more complicated: It appeared to depict a little person on the side of a slope.
“Person-on-the-side-of-a-mountain?”
“Which way is the person facing?”
Zomi crouched down to get a closer look. The head of the person was triangular, and the tip pointed to the top of the slope.
“The little guy is heading up the slope, I think.” Zomi pondered this. “Climb?”
“Good! Very good! It’s read as cotothu in Ano.” Luan took a bite from a piece of pastry he held with a pair of eating sticks. “You should try this, Mimi-tika.”
Zomi struggled with the eating sticks for a while, gave up, and picked up a piece of pastry with her hand despite the glare from Luan. It was really good!—sticky rice cake with coconut shavings, and the inside was filled with something that tasted like papaya and yet wasn’t papaya.
Still chewing, she managed to say between bites, “So you’re talking to the elder about climbing the mountain behind the village?”
Luan Zya smiled. “Good guessing. These are among the first logograms I learned as a child.”
“Are all the logograms just sculptures of what they say? These are easy to figure out! Why would you need years of schooling to learn them?”
Elder Comi had finished reading Luan’s question. He began to sculpt a response in the remaining squares in the writing tray.
“If you think it’s that easy, why don’t you tell me what Elder Comi is saying?”
Zomi examined the logograms as Elder Comi’s hands and carving knife shaped the clay, one square after another.
“That looks like a… scallop shell? But it’s in the same square as these two other things… Is that a really fat winter melon? And is that a banana leaf?”
Luan coughed and almost dropped his teacup. As he shielded his mouth with his sleeve, his face turned red as he laughed with his eyes until tears came out.
Zomi gave him a wounded look. “Kon Fiji said that it is not proper to laugh at those seeking knowledge.”
“Oh, so you can remember quotes from the One True Sage when you think they might be useful against your teacher.”
“Come on! Explain!”
“All right, all right. Ano logograms are much more than just sculptures of objects. How would you distinguish a hill from a mountain? How would you refer to anything complicated like a new type of waterwheel if you had to give an exact portrait of the thing you’re talking about? How would you say anything abstract like ‘honor’ or ‘courage’?”
Elder Comi put down the writing knife and made a please gesture at Luan.
Luan flattened the first logograms he had made and began to carve a response while continuing his explanation for Zomi.
“The ‘fat winter melon’ is actually a closed fist, and the ‘banana leaf’ is an open palm. A lot of Ano logograms incorporate stylized representations that are easy to carve but aren’t very close to the original anymore.”
“What does Elder Comi mean when he put a scallop shell next to a closed fist and an open palm?”
“The secret of the Ano logograms is the art of combinations… let me think—you like building things, so I’ll try to explain this to you the way an engineer would. Tell me, what is a machine?”
Having never given this question much thought—isn’t it obvious what a machine is?—Zomi struggled to formulate a response. “A machine is a… thing with gears and levers and other stuff.” It’s really hard to put into words what should be obvious. “Oh, they make work easier, like the ox-drawn plow is better and faster than a hoe.”
“Not bad! The great engineer Na Moji defined a machine in The Mechanical Art this way: A machine is an assembly of components put together to accomplish a purpose. But what are components?”
Zomi scrunched up her face in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“Think back to the sun-measuring scope you built. You put together two poles, a banana leaf stretched across a bamboo hoop, and a handheld mirror. What are each of those? Do they each have a purpose?”
Zomi thought about this. The two poles formed a cross for support; the bamboo hoop and the banana leaf, modeled on an embroidery hoop and cloth, provided a surface for recording; the mirror, made of a wooden handle attached to a bronze plate, was for reflecting light and casting a clear image. “They are each also… machines, made from their own components.”
“Exactly! A machine is made from sub-machines, each with its own purpose, and the machine orchestrates all these purposes together to accomplish a new purpose. And you can imagine that your sun-scope can be made into a component of an even larger machine—say, a device for tracing the reflection of an original image onto a new piece of paper: a copying machine.”
Luan put down the knife and gestured for Elder Comi to respond.
Zomi’s head was reeling. She pictured her crude sun-scope refined and enlarged, attached to a sitting board and an artist’s easel and systems of mirrors and lights and supporting struts so that a painting could be copied with exactitude. “That’s… amaze-licious and wonder-utiful.”
“When you constructed your sun-scope, you borrowed a mirror’s ability to reflect light, the bamboo poles’ resilience and flexibility, and the banana leaf’s smooth surface and combined them to do something that had never been done before. Engineering is the art of solving problems by combining existing machines into new machines, and harnessing the effects of the sub-machines to accomplish a novel effect. This is true whether you’re a fisherman weaving nets out of ropes and weights, a blacksmith hammering and shaping a plow on an anvil, or a cooper making a barrel from staves and hoops.”
Zomi sat there, slack-jawed. She had never heard of the idea of making things described this way. It sounded like art, like the poems sung by the traveling folk opera troupes, like… glimpsing the truth of the gods.
“It is possible, Na Moji said, to think of engineering as a kind of poetry. A poet assembles words into phrases, phrases into lines, lines into stanzas, and stanzas into poems. The engineer assembles raw components like nails and planks and ropes and gears into stock components, stock components into contraptions, contraptions into machines, and machines into systems. A poet marshals the words and phrases and stanzas for the purpose of moving the listener’s heart; an engineer marshals components and devices and effects for the purpose of changing the world.”