The loss of the physical
There was a recent piece in the Times on the demise of cursive (or as I called it growing up - script) handwriting. Among various laments for a society now dominated by print handwriting, such as the higher likelihood of forgeries and the inability to be able to read old documents, one section of the article was noteworthy to me:
Sandy Schefkind, a pediatric occupational therapist in Bethesda, Md., and pediatric coordinator for the American Occupational Therapy Association, said that learning cursive helped students hone their fine motor skills.
“It’s the dexterity, the fluidity, the right amount of pressure to put with pen and pencil on paper,” Ms. Schefkind said, adding that for some students cursive is easier to learn than printing.
For some time I’ve morned - at least what I perceive to be - the decrease in the interest of younger people in physically playing musical instruments, giving way instead to the use of computers. While there is no doubt, considering the myriad computer plug-ins and programs, that there are more musically creative outlets for people today than ever before, something is lost when all of one’s creativity is removed from a physical act. Vigorously strumming a guitar or having one’s fingers fly over the strings of a violin, moving in an unconscious state via the miracle of muscle memory, you become one with your music in a way that cannot be replicated when it is solely an intangible act. It just wouldn’t be the same for me to press a button on a keyboard and sit back while I hear a guitar being strummed. I need to feel the vibrations of the wood against my chest, I need to feel the wires beneath my fingertips, I need to feel my arm churning downward. Something powerful happens when you tie the physical with the creative.
As we move further and further away from a physical environment toward more of an automated one, we are denying a basic component of what makes us human. True, we don’t need to do as many physical acts as we once did, and in many ways that is a good thing (I’m not inclined to rub two sticks together every time I need a fire to boil some water). But when the pendulum has swung too far into the realm of the mind or the automated, we lose the joy of physicality, not to mention the much-discussed ill health effects of inactivity.
While I wouldn’t necessarily include the act of writing in script as an essential joy, it’s still worth considering its loss from a sheer pleasure standpoint. My late aunt used to run a small calligraphy business doing wedding and bar-mitzvah invitations and the like. I remember being struck, as a child, when she told me how she simply enjoyed the act of writing, that she found it therapeutic (though I doubt she used that word with me at the time). Although I didn’t take any particular joy in writing as a kid, and her response initially seemed strange, I think on another level I did sort of “get” what she meant. But more than just joy, perhaps the physical act of writing affects us on an even a deeper, thought-processing level. Many “old school” novelists still write their manuscripts out by hand, a good portion of which are done in cursive, then type them out (or have someone else type them) into a word processing program. There is something about the physical flow of your hand on the paper, they often say, that affects how their ideas flow from their head. Here are two quotes from an essay that covers the topic in detail:
Graham Greene commented that ‘Some authors type their works, but I cannot do that. Writing is tied up with the hand, almost with a special nerve’ (Hammond, 1984).
Iris Murdoch insisted that: ‘The word processor is… a glass square which separates one from one’s thoughts and gives them a premature air of completeness’ (Hammond, 1984). Elsewhere she asked how one could possibly write with ‘a machine between you and the page’. She preferred ‘the particular closeness’ of writing by hand (Hartill, 1989: 87)
Perhaps the philosophers say it best (more from that essay):
“In the early 1940s the philosopher Martin Heidegger expressed his horror at the proliferating use of the typewriter, seeing it as a threat to the special relationship between the word and the expressive movement of the hand: ‘The word no longer passes through the hand as it writes and acts authentically but through the mechanized pressure of the hand. The typewriter snatches script from the essential realm of the hand - and this means the hand is removed from the essential realm of the word. The word becomes something “typed”’
We should be very careful about our seemingly inexorable separation of physicality from creativity. And not only the separation from creativity, but from an essential joy of being an animal and using the tools - our muscles, bones and all the connective tissues - of our bodies. We may not need to get out of our chairs often, if at all, these days, but I always feel better after a walk than I do after sitting staring at a screen.
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