In museum drawers in Scotland there are gold rings with sentences hidden inside them. From the outside they are plain, or lightly enamelled, the sort of thing that would pass without comment on a hand. The inscription is on the inner face of the band, where it sat against the skin of whoever wore it and was visible to nobody at all.
They are called posy rings, after the short verses engraved in them, and they were given in Scotland and elsewhere from roughly the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. Usually between lovers, though also between friends and within families. One found in Stirlingshire reads I am zovris, which is to say I am yours. Another, from Edinburgh, carries a line of Scots that runs quhair this I give I wiss to live.
The placement is the interesting part. The words face inward. The person wearing the ring cannot read them while it is on, and everybody else never sees them at all. Whatever the inscription was for, it was not for reading.
A similar arrangement turns up a long way from Scotland. Omamori are small amulets given out at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples in Japan, usually a brocade pouch closed with a cord. Inside is a piece of paper or wood with a prayer or an invocation written on it. The tradition holds that the pouch is not opened, and that opening it loses whatever protection it was carrying. Old ones are taken back to the shrine rather than thrown away, often around the new year, and burned there.
Two traditions with almost nothing in common arrive at the same shape. A word is written down with care, and then put somewhere it will not be read. In the Japanese case the sealing is the whole point, and the writing is understood to be doing its work precisely because it stays closed.
It is fair to ask what a sentence nobody reads is supposed to accomplish. There is no tidy answer, and the two traditions would not give the same one. A posy ring is a promise made once and then carried. An omamori is closer to a request left with somebody else to hold. Neither is a message in the ordinary sense, because a message expects to arrive somewhere.
What they have in common is the person carrying them. The wearer knows the words are there. That knowledge seems not to need rereading in order to stay active, in the way you can know a photograph is in your wallet without taking it out to look at it. The object is doing something in the background, and most of what it does happens while attention is elsewhere.
This is difficult to study and easy to overclaim. A good deal has been written about reminders and cues and how they shape behaviour, and much of it is more tentative than the summaries of it suggest. What can be said without stretching anything is that people have done this for a very long time, in places with no contact with each other, and that they went to real expense to do it. Gold was engraved. Silk was sewn shut. That is a lot of trouble for a word nobody would see.
The same arrangement runs through our own work. The Words of Intention are printed inside the neck of a shirt, or across the back, out of the wearer's own sight. It changes who the word is addressed to. A word across the chest is aimed at the room. A word inside a collar is aimed at one person, and only that person knows it is there.
Each Word has a page of its own, set beside the photograph it was drawn from. Balance is one of them.
The rings are in drawers now, catalogued and photographed, their inscriptions finally read by strangers. That is close to the opposite of what they were made for, and probably not something the people who commissioned them would have minded very much. The words had already done their work, quietly, against a hand, for as long as somebody was wearing them.
A quiet extension of this idea
Our pieces are built around this principle. A single word, placed so it naturally comes back into your attention during the day. Not something you have to focus on the whole day, just something that stays with you.
