Railing Codex /ˈreɪlɪŋ ˈkəʊdɛks/ noun

1. A writing project initiated by Pararailing in April 2022. 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 genre and language. 

3. A relay. Contributors each select one word from their respective entry and nominate a writer to participate in the next volume. The nominated writer chooses from this new list of words.

4. A story, which goes as follows:

Last fall, after bidding farewell to our physical space in Shanghai, we proceeded to work 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. We felt lucky that we had had a space, because anything that follows “Pararailing is a space” always and automatically sounds decent.   Without “a space” as our temporary recourse, we are 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? In tandem with the birth of Pararailing, the word “pararailing” was coined. We remember the backstory of this made-up word by heart. It began with an encounter with a Wikipedia entry, which defines railings as “in general … a boundary feature.”   Odd yet precisely worded, this definition intrigued us. A word that literally means boundary comes with a boundary of its own—this self-referentiality opens up the word’s possibilities, a portal pointing to everything it is not and everything that lies beyond it. What are the cases that are not general? Under such non-general circumstances, will the meanings of “railing” and their antonyms conflate? Could “pararailing” become a potential definition for “railing”? If so, does it mean that any railing—whether outside of our doors, at airport customs, or between cultures, nations, and languages—carries with it a meaning of “leaping over itself”? Whether or not these questions stand up to rigorous scrutiny, they serve as mental hurdle practice in a world ambushed with railings. 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 writers to contribute original definitions for words 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.  This past April, we began working on Volume 1 with our first cohort of contributors. The first list of words bears a deep connection with Pararailing. During the early days of Pararailing, we would jot down our preliminary ideas in a Google Doc. A few pages in this document were dedicated to 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. 

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, paper 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, contour line; related to spatial relationship/movement: translation, parallel, overlap, juxtaposition, coordinate, fold, fill, displacement;  related to mathematics: complement (set theory), empty set, union (set theory), obtuse/acute angle, line segment, tolerance (statistics), variance (statistics)

These words were the products of a brainstorming session on what to name ourselves. In the end, “railing” came out on top, and “pararailing” was born. The rest of the words became the unfortunate, nameless runners-up in this competition, lost in this tiny ocean of lexicon. But we never forgot about the other words that could have become “Pararailing.” So we made a list and asked twenty contributors—artists, curators, writers, poets, scholars, and art professionals, including the three organizers of Pararailing— to write about them in their chosen language and genre. This project is a salvage operation for Pararailing’s history and a rescue mission for these lost words. The ethos of Pararailing’s programming can be traced back to the moment when we stumbled upon that Wikipedia definition, our thinking and imagination drastically expanded by the encounter with such an ordinary word. To rescue a word is to liberate it from its preexisting definitions and our own impressions of it, 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.  But 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 can words seep into our reality and trickle into the streams of our lives? And how can the ebb and flow of life, experience, and emotion enter every word, every dictionary? Ink saturated, pages soaked; we reshape knowledge like kneading a piece of clay, allowing meanings to emerge. These meanings belong to us and remain faithful to what is real; they compile our own alternative codex.   By then, this codex of railings will be liberated from Pararailing, arriving somewhere even further beyond. Each contributor is asked to invite a writer to participate in the next volume and to pick a word from their respective entry for the next writer to interpret. Word-hurdling is a relay race; Pararailing has no power to set the finish line, and perhaps, we too wish there was no finish line. We are equally curious to see how far Pararailing can reach beyond itself.   At the starting line, let us re-introduce ourselves. Written at a time when Railing Codex was yet to be born, our answers to What is Pararailing?_ _might have secretly bred the idea all along. The following definition of “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 routine 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—an em dash;   A key? A keyhole.  

Text by Sixing Xu, May 2022