Hand Writing

In English class, seventh grade, I could not keep my attention on Mr. Potratz, reaching high and carefully diagramming sentences on the blackboard with white chalk. He was perhaps not born in America but somewhere in Europe. He wore a formal pinstriped suit, a vest with watch chain, a carefully knotted tie. The suit had been tailored to fit his short, mis-shapen, hump-backed body. We students did not make fun of him openly. It was 1958 and such a thing wasn’t done. But we were not interested in whether a word was an adverb, and where it belonged in a diagram!

I sat writing my name over and over in precise penmanship. It was a long name. I loved the capital letters, especially the magnificent “K,” flowing with extra flourishes as it began and ended. My cartridge pen was full of blue ink. I kept writing throughout the class. When I tired of my own name, I started in on someone else’s, careful not to reveal my favorite friends.

None of us knew how Mr. Potratz ended up in a small town in northern Iowa, teaching junior high English with a careful formality. But I do credit those class hours with furthering my love of cursive hand writing. We had learned the Palmer method in second grade. It was meant to simplify writing and it was efficient, but the capitals had some loops and curls in them. I got better over the years. By the time I got to college, I could get down on paper much of a lecture as I listened.

Hand writing led to journaling, my best defense against loneliness when I lived abroad and then the many years when I couldn’t really talk to my first husband. Journaling helps you make a friend of yourself and grow a powerful inner life. 

Many recent studies tout the value of writing notes by hand because of the areas of the brain stimulated by coordinating hands, eyes, memory and auditory clues. I have no doubt that this is true, but it is really the beauty of marks on a page that I love. They are so expressive of the individual who makes them. Beyond the meaning of words, they are often beautiful in and of themselves.

Of course I took a class in calligraphy, but found the discipline necessary to the art, the endless practice and repetiton were not what I wanted to do. I did have a friend, Linda Race, with whom I made a movie featuring a calligrapher. What would happen if a tai chi master and a calligrapher met on an island? Haiku! Tenth Moon!

And I have also been fascinated by the alphabets of different languages. I dipped into Russian at one point, loving the Cyrillic letters foreign to us. Modern Russian poets drew me. Lately I’ve been exploring Chinese characters. Not a determined attempt to learn the language, but just an enjoyment of the expressive characters. Again, this is a chance to get closer to the Chinese poets I love. So far I am just getting used to the strokes and stroke order, using YouTube instruction.

I am no scholar and have never pretended to be. I am, I find, a storyteller who takes advantage of whatever comes my way. Language sets humans apart, in particular the telling of stories. We invented time, the past, present and future, for this purpose. Time is baked into our stories, giving them their significance. Writing them down is recent. We’ve only been doing it for five or six thousand years. Our marvelous hands are also integral to our humanity.

The secret of writing, yours, mine or anyone else’s: it holds time as the hidden, sometimes explosive truths of our lives unfold. Photographs and movies also capture time, but the invisible feelings, the emotional weather will be forgotten if not recorded in words. Of course, this is usually okay. We don’t need to know everything. But sometimes we would like to know how things were for our forebears. Old letters, old diaries, hand-written texts, could tell us. 

I remember my mother and father standing over a fire and burning the apple box full of letters they had written to each other before they were married. They were laughing, remembering incidents. I did not feel sad about the burnt letters. My parents had no dark secrets to hide, and were instead giving us the space to have lives and letters of our own. I had spied on those letters, being especially intrigued by a ribbon of paper my playful mother had written on and sent, wound around a spool. I did regret the history lost.

Your hand, moving across the page, is capturing time as it flows. It is a beautiful way to express what is in your particular brain as it engages with your hands, in the present. Each of us are fractals, blooming, expanding, repeating previous patterns. How does this intricate dance go? Who knows how long your letter or notebook might be buried in dusty boxes before someone finds it and is thrilled.