![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mapsedgeI like my hands.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed the way they could take cardboard, white glue, a sewing pin, two batteries, and the bulb out of Dad's flashlight and make spaceships with cockpits that opened and engines that lit up.
As an adult, I like the way they look moving over piano keys - it's like watching water flow over small stones in a quiet, shadowed creek. I like how they look on guitar strings. I like the way they look stroking my child's hair. I have always liked the way they feel moving over my wife's skin.
I have always liked my hands. Lately though, they've been letting me down.
My hands, you see, have forgotten how to write. It's not like I'm a doctor and writing hurriedly all day on small pads with a signature line only the monosyllabically named could love. The mechanics of cursive writing are still mostly there, but certain parts are missing, or short circuited. Any combination of letters involving "humps" or "R+vowel" combos are problematic. The word "Mississippi" is quite impossible, and "workaround" becomes - and I actually stopped to try this - "workoronnl". Or something like that.
Could be the years. Forty-three years of really hard use takes its toll, certainly. I've done all kinds of physical projects from woodworking to sewing, and each one leaves a distinctive mark. Or wound. There are several scars; I can tell you where each came from, and a couple of them aren't even visible on the surface. They're under the skin, little numb spots that feel different to the touch.
While I was tailoring everyday, I had almost no fingerprints, abrading them off over time with the working of the fabric. Odd, isn't it?
It could be the caffeine. I get quite a lot of it and having several mili-amps of chemically induced voltage coursing to your extremities does have the effect of upsetting, or at least jostling, the synaptic apple cart. It can't be just that though. I was ramped in college most of the time, but I also did a lot of writing back then. The idea of a laptop in class was still fifteen years away: we all took notes with Bic pens or Mead #2 pencils on lined paper. I thought I was really cool because I bought the light gray tablets while everyone else had white. My hands never expressed a preference.
The fact is, I just don't write as much as I used to, in the physical sense of taking a writing instrument in my hand and putting words on paper, sans-keyboard. I still write lyrics longhand. The songwriting process is laborious for me, and the enforced slowness of hand-writing makes me stop and think about the images and ideas. (When I'm done, though, I have to transcribe those scratchings on a computer while the ideas are still fresh. Lyrics, weeks later, are not terrifically legible.) Most everything else, even personal correspondence, is on a computer now. I cannot remember the last time I wrote, with my hand, "Dear family member," ...
In my parents' day, the lament was penmanship. The ballpoint pen made the fountain pen and the pen and inkwell before it obsolete. Writing had become cheap, and since there is little technique involved in using a ballpoint and no real style to the instrument anyway, that lack translates to the words on the page. My grandfather had gorgeous handwriting, elegant and angular, with a slight right-ward slant and long, narrow descenders. On unlined paper he could write a hundred lines of text ruler-straight.
He wrote a lot. So did my mother, his daughter. Her handwriting was also attractive.
We lead faster lives than, say, twenty years ago, most of us at some remove from the handwritten word. Email replaces postal mail replaces couriered missive replaces scrolls in the catacombs replaces tales around the fire at night. We lose some skills, and gain others.
I still like my hands, though.
When I was a kid, I enjoyed the way they could take cardboard, white glue, a sewing pin, two batteries, and the bulb out of Dad's flashlight and make spaceships with cockpits that opened and engines that lit up.
As an adult, I like the way they look moving over piano keys - it's like watching water flow over small stones in a quiet, shadowed creek. I like how they look on guitar strings. I like the way they look stroking my child's hair. I have always liked the way they feel moving over my wife's skin.
I have always liked my hands. Lately though, they've been letting me down.
My hands, you see, have forgotten how to write. It's not like I'm a doctor and writing hurriedly all day on small pads with a signature line only the monosyllabically named could love. The mechanics of cursive writing are still mostly there, but certain parts are missing, or short circuited. Any combination of letters involving "humps" or "R+vowel" combos are problematic. The word "Mississippi" is quite impossible, and "workaround" becomes - and I actually stopped to try this - "workoronnl". Or something like that.
Could be the years. Forty-three years of really hard use takes its toll, certainly. I've done all kinds of physical projects from woodworking to sewing, and each one leaves a distinctive mark. Or wound. There are several scars; I can tell you where each came from, and a couple of them aren't even visible on the surface. They're under the skin, little numb spots that feel different to the touch.
While I was tailoring everyday, I had almost no fingerprints, abrading them off over time with the working of the fabric. Odd, isn't it?
It could be the caffeine. I get quite a lot of it and having several mili-amps of chemically induced voltage coursing to your extremities does have the effect of upsetting, or at least jostling, the synaptic apple cart. It can't be just that though. I was ramped in college most of the time, but I also did a lot of writing back then. The idea of a laptop in class was still fifteen years away: we all took notes with Bic pens or Mead #2 pencils on lined paper. I thought I was really cool because I bought the light gray tablets while everyone else had white. My hands never expressed a preference.
The fact is, I just don't write as much as I used to, in the physical sense of taking a writing instrument in my hand and putting words on paper, sans-keyboard. I still write lyrics longhand. The songwriting process is laborious for me, and the enforced slowness of hand-writing makes me stop and think about the images and ideas. (When I'm done, though, I have to transcribe those scratchings on a computer while the ideas are still fresh. Lyrics, weeks later, are not terrifically legible.) Most everything else, even personal correspondence, is on a computer now. I cannot remember the last time I wrote, with my hand, "Dear family member," ...
In my parents' day, the lament was penmanship. The ballpoint pen made the fountain pen and the pen and inkwell before it obsolete. Writing had become cheap, and since there is little technique involved in using a ballpoint and no real style to the instrument anyway, that lack translates to the words on the page. My grandfather had gorgeous handwriting, elegant and angular, with a slight right-ward slant and long, narrow descenders. On unlined paper he could write a hundred lines of text ruler-straight.
He wrote a lot. So did my mother, his daughter. Her handwriting was also attractive.
We lead faster lives than, say, twenty years ago, most of us at some remove from the handwritten word. Email replaces postal mail replaces couriered missive replaces scrolls in the catacombs replaces tales around the fire at night. We lose some skills, and gain others.
I still like my hands, though.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-09-17 15:10 (UTC)Not just the physicality of writing - we have lost the beauty of language. We live in the world of LOL, OMG, and BFF today.
If you have not seen it, procure a copy of "Ride with the Devil" that was shot around here. Its worth as a movie can be argued, and its historical points debated. But it captures the eloquence of the way people used to talk to one another. The way old letters come across as great prose instead of mere facts transmitted in the least amount of time required.