Stations: On Eric Gill and the Poetics of Stone

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We begin with the rules of the form: the words must be cut with fair attention to the punchline. Craft determines that the letterer and the punchcutter are not of the same character. Patience determines the craft of both:

Of patience there is this to be said. To be patient is to suffer. By their fruits men know one another, but by their sufferings they are what they are. And suffering is not merely the endurance of physical or mental anguish, but of joy also. A rabbit caught in a trap may be supposed to suffer physical anguish: but it suffers nothing else. The man crucified may be supposed to suffer physical & mental anguish, but he suffers also intense happiness and joy. The industrialist workman is often simply as a rabbit in a trap; the artist is often as a man nailed to a cross. In patience souls are possessed. No lower view of the matter will suffice.

(Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography)

Of patience we call to attention the following: Gill Sans—Gill Cameo— Perpetua—Golden Cockerel Roman—Hague and Gill Joanna—Monotype Joanna—Aries—Solus—Jubilee—Bunyan—Floriated Capitals—Gill Shadow Line. It is easy to write in the work of Eric Gill.

Each day in this process of attention or attenuation I walk up onto the moor above my house in search of fresh air. I live in a place where trees do not grow easily, so windbreaks between portions of land are fashioned in stone, stone walls I walk along.

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How many prisoners notice the quality of the material that limits their point of view at a level more than the perception of their physical discomfort? We might remark the coolness or heat of wall or floor, its darkness or light, its basic texture. . . . Yet once freed, how many will be perpetually affected in their encounters with the same material that was also used to form the prison walls?

I have been struggling to write about the work of Eric Gill; in the writing is the discomfort. There is something at the side of the frame that I can’t see, a known secret of unprimed canvas, as it were. This either produces the impetus to write or has precipitated the struggle. Gill was not, first and foremost, a painter. Nor was he, first and foremost, a typographical artist. Gill worked in and with stone.

In his first philosophical investigation, Wittgenstein develops the basis of a “primitive language”: engrossed in the act of building, A (master) calls out, and B (apprentice) brings the required stone. Repeat at each station until the wall is fully formed.

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Yes, I have been struggling with stone, but now know to focus in on this most fluid of materials.

Begin again: Hoptonwood is a limestone of peculiar qualities. The eye— unknowing and walled in by certain expectations of Hoptonwood and its implications—creates visual myths, which we—not seeing how we see them—tacitly, even unknowingly, accept. Such immured vision prevents our noticing the true nature of the stone.

This is to write that Hoptonwood, quarried in the Peak District of Derbyshire and of a characteristic gray-cream hue, is a usefully hard stone. It is therefore favored in Britain for carving and sculpture of an indigenous, decorative variety.

The stone taxonomized under this name is itself various. Whether “light,” “dark,” “marbled,” or whorled with the smallest of fossils, the voids in the limestone are filled by recrystallized calcite, and, as a whole, the stone reliable. Because it is hard, it is used as curbing in the Peaks, as interior flooring in public buildings. Because it is hard, its surface can be polished to a shine, and because of this plastic quality in particular, there was a time when the stone was mis-sold as marble. This has for a century now been rectified. We continue to polish the stone.

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One hundred twenty thousand Commonwealth graves are carved from Hoptonwood, with the stones shipped from Derbyshire to France and Belgium and installed. Pulled teeth in uniform...