Railing Codex /ˈreɪlɪŋ ˈkəʊdɛks/ noun

1. a writing project initiated by Pararailing in April, 2022. It was launched online in June of the same year

2. a dictionary with expanding volumes. In each volume, contributors select one word from a designated list and interpret it in their chosen genres and languages. 

3. a relay. The contributors each select a word from their respective entry and nominate a writer to join the next volume. The nominated writers choose from this new list of words.

4. a story, which goes as follows:

In the fall of 2021, after bidding farewell to our physical space in Shanghai, we began working on a new introductory text for Pararailing. Finding a fitting definition for ourselves has always been challenging: “an institution” is too pretentious, and “an organization” feels awkwardly formal. Luckily we had a space, and everything that follows “Pararailing is a space” always and automatically sounds decent.  Without “the space” as our temporary recourse, we are now back to square one. In the first article published on our WeChat account, we asked: “What is beyond the railing?” The question now requires a more inquisitive follow-up: what is “beyond the railing,” namely Pararailing? What we do know is that in tandem with the birth of Pararailing, the made-up word “pararailing” was also born. We are, in fact, familiar with the backstory of this word. We saw on Wikipedia that a railing is defined as “in general… a boundary feature.”  Odd yet precisely worded, this definition intrigued us. It sets boundary to a word that literally means boundary—the self-referentiality seems to open up the word’s possibilities, like a portal pointing to everything it is not and everything that lies beyond it. What are some cases that are not general? Under such non-general circumstances, will the meanings of “railing” and its antonym conflate? If so, could “pararailing” become one of the definitions for “railing”, and does any railings—the ones outside of our doors, by airport customs, and around cultures, nations, and languages—carry within it a meaning of leaping over it?  Whether these rhetorical questions stand up to rigorous scrutiny or not, in a world ambushed with railings, they are a hurdling practice for our minds. More than a year after the founding of Pararailing, we launched Railing Codex, where “words” are our next railing to jump over. A writing project, Railing Codex invites different writers to contribute original entries for words individually picked from a designated list. As the project continues in consecutive rounds, the collected entries are compiled into a dictionary of expanding volumes , a collectively written encyclopedia.  In the April of 2022, we began working on Volume 1 with our first cohort of contributors. The first list of words bore a deep connection with Pararailing. During the early days of Pararailing, we used to jot down preliminary ideas in a Google Doc. A few pages in this document were dedicated to just words, seemingly arbitrary and all-encompassing, ranging from daily objects and actions to architectural elements, mathematical concepts, and geological terms. “Railing” was one of them. 

The list of words provided to the Volume 1 contributors: appendage, pile, although, belong, universal, crack, family; preposition; iota, clamor, medium, tablet, hanzi grid, prime, imaginary/rational number, ordinal, however, index, reference, film, resonance; related to writing/notetaking: pen, title page, rivet, peper clip, attachment, label; related to architecture: balcony, park, platform, porch, railing, roller blind; screen, window; related to geography: ridge, fault, tectonic plates, perihelion, aphelion, [solar] zenith angle, monsoon, convection, countorline; related to spatial relationship/movement: translaton, parallel, overlap, juxtaposition, coordinate, fold, fill, exchange; related to mathematics: complement (set theory), empty set, union (set theory), obsute/acute angle, line segment, tolerance (statistics), variance (statistics)

These words were the products of a brainstorming session, when we were looking for a name to define ourselves. In the end, “railing” came out on top, and “pararailing” was coined. The rest of the words became the unfortunate runner-ups to a competition, never made known and remained lost in this tiny ocean of lexicon. But we never forgot about these other words that could have become “Pararailing” and decided to include them all in the initial list of words for the Codex. Twenty contributors—artists, curators, writers, poets, scholars, and art professionals, including the three organizers of Pararailing—were asked to pick one word and write about it, in their chosen language and genre.  This project is a salvage operation for Pararailing’s history, as well as a rescue mission for these words. Every time we develop programming for Pararailing, we always return to that early encounter with the Wikipedia entry, when our thinking and imagination were drastically expanded by the encounter with such a ordinary word. To rescue a word is to liberate it from its preexisting definitions and our impressions, thereby liberating our minds. The basic units that constitute our language, words shape the grounds on which we speak, communicate, and perceive. Words are commonplace and vast. Neatly classified by their parts of speech and meanings, words present to us knowledge in the form of dictionaries: bound into volumes, knowledge is palpable, inexhaustible, and always at hand. A word remains unknown to us regardless of our knowledge of it. What is this word, and what else can it mean, if it is stripped of the imprints of books, websites, and our minds? How could words connect us to our reality, trickling down and into the stream of our life? And how could the ebbs and flows of our life, experiences, and emotions enter every word, every dictionary? At one point, the ink would spread, the pages soaked; we reshape our knowledge as if kneading a piece of clay, allowing meanings to emerge. Belonging to ourselves and faithful to what is real, the meanings will compile an alternative codex of our own.  By then, the codex of railings will too be liberated from Pararailing, arriving at somewhere even further beyond. From their respective entry, each contributor picks out another word for the next volume. Each would invite another writer to join that upcoming volume and interpret a new set of words. The word-hurdling race is a relay ; Pararailing has no power to decide its finishing line, and perhaps having no end is for the best. We are more curious than anyone to witness how far Pararailing can extend beyond itself.  At the starting line, we would like to share our revised intro text for Pararailing. It was written at a time when Railing Codex was yet to be born. In retrospect, the idea might have been there all this time. The following definition for “Pararailing” is but another entry in the Railing Codex: 

In general, railings are a boundary feature. Pararailing is, then,  a loose procession, a provisional state, a failed rhetoric, an un-free fall, a misaligned wish, an indefinite speculation; a set of rules, a violation of rules, a gathering, a routined gathering, a foreshadowing, a note, a visit, an observation, a circumstance beyond plans, somewhere beyond railings; a noun, a preposition, an adverb, a linking word, half of a wisecrack — a long dash;  A key? A keyhole. 

Text by Sixing Xu, May 2022