Gloves on!

So,​ your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated. I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year. Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.

Hard to describe or explain the shame of bad handwriting.

Bad handwriting is ugly. Also it is inauthentic. In the sense it is not you.

Parkinson’s is a disease that turns off certain genes in the cells of the brain, no one knows why. Many physical actions, and some cognitive actions, are thereby inhibited or mangled.

In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge writes:

Each cell in our body contains all our genes, but not all those genes are turned on or expressed. When a gene is turned on, it makes a new protein that alters the structure and function of the cell. This is called the transcription function because when the gene is turned on, information about how to make these proteins is ‘transcribed’ or read from the individual gene.

So the brain has its own handwriting. Which depends on a certain protein. I can imagine my poor brain throwing up its hands in dismay to find all the good handwriting protein gone or a mess.

Entering the shatter zone. Hands within hands. Metabolic and metaphorical vectors overlap. Is this confusing? Yes, it is confusing.

What a difference there is between Keats’s handwriting in letters or notes for a poem and his ‘fair copies’ made for publishers or friends. I study this difference. I say to myself, it’s just a matter of attention; turn the page, pay attention, try again. I try again; I am wrong. Life slips one more notch towards barbarity.

Life is no longer fair!

Handwriting is a mark from inside me that I put outside me, often with a view to showing, telling, communicating. It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the inscape’ out. (Note: Hopkins meant several different things by ‘inscape’, which I don’t know enough about his psyche or his poetics to represent here, but those Dublin notebooks – wow!)

If your writing slants to the right you are a person strongly influenced by your father; procrastinators dot their ‘i’s to the left, etc. Graphology is the study of handwriting as a clue to character analysis. It’s hard to believe it isn’t a good clue.

Scriptural disintegration: also scary as an image of the cognitive breakdown that is another gradual effect of Parkinson’s disease. Vagueness, forgetting, discontinuity, gaps and fissures, slowdowns, stops. When critics talk about the ‘late style’ of Beethoven or Baudelaire, do they mean marks on paper as well as, or as a clue to, hauntings in the brain?

‘In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,’ Adorno writes in Essays on Music.

Graphologically speaking, the art of Cy Twombly poses an aberration. His paintings feature handwritten words inscribed in such a way as to avoid offering any clues to him or his character or his inside state. Scribbled, scrawled, gauche, idle, unlovely – the hand is no one’s, or everyone’s, or mythic, or just a stain left behind by something written there before. A mark with no person in it. No shame.

Neurologists now seem to believe that the brain is plastic and that certain activities can rewire it, by generating new neurons to replace lost ones or by exciting neurons that have gone idle or slow. Boxing is recommended. I go to a boxing class three times a week. Everyone in the class has Parkinson’s, various degrees of damage. At a certain point in each class (after stretching, shadow-boxing, drills, strength training) the instructor yells: ‘Gloves on!’ We rush to the lockers for our boxing gloves. Putting on your first glove is easy. To don the second glove you have to get help. ‘Don’t use your teeth!’ the instructor calls out. Interesting fact: it is impossible to conjure the black doorway while someone else is putting a boxing glove on you.

Tremor, what is it? Uncontrollable shaking of a limb, identified by the English surgeon and apothecary James Parkinson in 1817 as one of the first symptoms noticeable in people suffering from what he called ‘the Shaking Palsy’.

When I try to produce a complicated movement like a one-two-four-five combination in boxing (left jab, right cross, right hook, left uppercut) I can feel the neurons in my brain struggling and striving. Yes, I can feel it. Now you think I’m crazy. Sorry, neurologically diverse.

Let’s say a tremor is produced by electricity flowing along a nerve path at a speed I don’t like and can’t control. For example, when I am brushing my teeth, which I do with my right arm and hand, where I have a tremor, the toothbrush whams up and down at a savage pace, colliding with lips and gums. But a nerve path has a plane of action. If I concentrate and change the plane – by moving my arm up or down – I can interrupt the flow and still the tremor. Concentration is key. I have to think into the motion.

A man called John D. Pepper has discovered something similar in managing his problems walking. He addresses his problems with walking by walking: fifteen miles per week in three sessions of five miles each at a pace of four miles per hour. Four miles per hour is a faster pace than I naturally want to walk. It is a struggle. I have to pay attention to the motion. That is, motor movements that another person might perform automatically require conscious attention from me. By engaging this conscious-movement technique, Pepper enabled himself to tame the tremor and other motor symptoms. He probably got Parkinson’s in his thirties (although it wasn’t diagnosed at the time) and is now in his nineties. Intensely, he thrives.

Righting oneself against a current that never ceases to pull: the books tell me to pay conscious, continual attention to actions like walking, writing, brushing my teeth, if I want to inhibit or delay the failure of neurons in the brain. It is hard to live within constant striving. It is hard to live within the word ‘degenerative’, which means that, however I strive, I do not win.

Of course everyone is striving all their life. And no one wins against mortality. But there is a difference between striving to (say) learn ancient Greek or do the vacuuming and striving to pay microscopic attention to every instant of a physical act. Studying his own way of walking in Reverse Parkinson’s Disease, Pepper analyses it into nine segments of action and six targets of attention for each step he takes. Check it out. The man is intense.

Writing this essay in a notebook with a ballpoint pen has been a chastening exercise. The handwriting is maybe 60 per cent legible. I do not achieve any Twombly-like liberation from the husk of cliché or the shackles of my personality with this scrawl. The hand is all too much me. And, frankly, a bit loathsome.

But let’s keep it light at the end. Quoting Barthes may lift the tone.

Describing the gaucherie of Twombly’s hand Barthes remarks on its lightness, its inclination gradually to erase itself and fade away in a vapour of innocence. He admires the impulse ‘to link in a single state what appears and what disappears; [not] to separate exaltation of life from fear of death [but] to produce a single affect: neither Eros nor Thanatos, but Life-Death, in a single thought, a single gesture’ – a single tremor?