Hand Writing
A love letter to real markings
“…how I love your handwriting, that running shadow of your voice…” Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to his wife Véra (1937), Letters to Véra
How almost miraculous is writing by hand? Ink in pen or brush that makes makes markings to connect feeling and idea onto a transportable and shared surface we call paper is such an extraordinary invention that it kind of makes you glad that Man Ray wasn’t texting Lee Miller. Ink is a communicator. What happens when one of the great tools of communication begins to tell its own story? This story of matter and spirt has so fascinated me (and the director Brian D. Johnson and the NFB and a whole network of extraordinary contributors) that it is becoming a film (The Color of Ink) in its final stages of filming now. It’s a story of mud and iron, bones and salt, soot and tree gums of flowers and blood and cacti. Ink intensifies, conveys and holds onto feeling. Natural ink for me is a way to explore the moment (as in a good love letter) where hand and spirit meet.
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I keep a handwritten journal, my partner journals digitally. It is interesting to see what differs in our practises. I do it in part to improve my handwriting - and it works. I do get conpliments on the style of my writings elsewhere. And just yesterday I journaled on all the people I see in my scribblings. My mothers capital letter headings, my fathers fast pen, my best friend from exchange student year and her bubbly foreign style, my design school arts friend who still to this day use her hand writing as a font in her work. I see them all showing up in my weekly journal. I doubt my partner has just that experience. My journaling is slower and his faster and better edited. Anyways. Thank you for a beautiful news letter! /Sweden
All the fortuitous things that happened pre-Covid that are now small wonders and new habits, practices, ways of living. I started a daily writing practice. I always viewed that concept from afar wondering wtf do people write. This to the person who is told so frequently: you should write. It confounds. Until I had a prompt, perhaps the easiest one ever, write anything, but just write, stream of consciousness and this is natural and the easiest thing most days. Before my favorite pencil store shutdown I ordered a hopeful years supply of pencils, tombow 6B. Soft, black, smudgey, kinda fat and smooth as all f. I also only use dot grid paper with a Kraft cover. I keep two postcards in the partial envelope/folder - one Jarman, one Blunk. I now write on the subway. Most days there are still few enough people, and always on the uptown e I’m often the only person on the train. I can finish just as I roll into 50th. I fear someone at work might try and figure who’s sitting in my spot and look in my bag, and they find my journal.