The BBC had an article last week bemoaning the loss of handwriting — copperplate, cursive — whatever name by which you learned it. When I taught school, I taught letter shaping; in my Spanish class in college, we learned to make animal shapes of our capital letters — mainly because my Spanish teacher’s first name began with an I that became a beautiful swan. He felt artistry in writing should be encouraged, so we dutifully practiced writing cursive — in Spanish — and beautifully. (And speaking of writing beautifully, have you seen Justina’s tribute to Dia Calhoun’s calligraphy? Glory, go look at that woman’s artistic lettering.)
But apparently it’s not taught in many British schools, at least.
Of course, there is the usual well-bred panic from people when things change — people deeply feared the typewriter as impersonal, and how many times have we had the evils of email preached? One respondent to the article amusingly remarked that it likely seemed a shame to people when we passed on from cuneiform as well — and maybe only geese rejoiced when people stopped using quills. For my part, since coming to the UK, I’ve indulged my love for ink and enjoyed writing with easy to find and inexpensive fountain pens. Penmanship can be art — and maybe sometimes the art isn’t all in the appearance, but in the content.
All of this brought to mind a poem I’d read, and the phrase, “the point of style is character.”
Writing
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen’s point or brush’s tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger’s to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the ‘Slender Gold.’ A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.
Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.
Writing” by Howard Nemerov, is from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov, © 1977.
Poetry Friday is Mr. Linky’d at Picture Book of the Day.
