Day 953: The Wonder of Writing

 

Isn't writing - actual handwriting - something wonderful?  I think so. Howard Nemerov here agrees.

 

 

Writing - Howard Nemerov

 

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.