Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me. My responsibility to forms can’t be gracefully fulfilled. Nonetheless, I offer the following in the hope it does not strike you as dishevelled or depressing.

To right away avoid being depressing, and because beginnings are important, I’ll begin with a poem by the Roman poet Catullus, who lived in the first century BC and died at the age of thirty. He was himself the beginning of the Roman lyric poetry tradition. This is fragment 46, a poem invoking the start of spring:

Now spring unlocks!
Now the equinox stops its blue rages quiet
as pages.
I tell you, Catullus, leave Troy, leave the ground burning, they did.
Look we will change everything, all the meanings,
all the clear cities of Asia you and me.
Now the mind, isn’t she an avid previous hobo?
Now the feet grow leaves so glad to see whose green baits
awaits.
Oh sweet don’t go
back the same way, go a new way.

Catullus was perhaps the favourite poet of Cy Twombly, a painter who used a lot of handwriting on his canvases. Critics were provoked by this and Roland Barthes wrote an essay about it in The Responsibility of Forms. ‘How to draw a line that is not stupid’ is a question he asks in the essay. How to draw a line that is not stupid: isn’t this one of our big problems as humans? Whether I am me or whether I am Hitler or whether I am Wilhelm von Humboldt, it is a problem of human life.

Let’s start with life, 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, a pirate, 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 glanced over from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

Carson wearing her boxing gloves.

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 just embarrassing. Or, Barthes would say, stupid. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.

Hard to describe or explain the shame of bad handwriting.

Bad handwriting is ugly. It looks sort of stupid. I was going to say it feels inauthentic, but then I realised that the opposite is the case. In its badness my chaotic handwriting seems to reveal something about me that I’d rather not look at. It carries what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the inscape’ out. ‘Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind,’ Confucius said. Graphology, as I’m sure you know, is the study of handwriting as a clue to character analysis. Hard to believe it isn’t a good clue.

If my script slants to the right, I am a person strongly influenced by my father; if I am a procrastinator, I dot my i’s to the left; if I am Hitler, I have very very tiny script and dot my i’s with a slash mark. And here is an interesting incidental fact about hands: when a person who has been paralysed from the neck down is given a tool that allows them to write with their mouth, they reproduce the same handwriting style as before paralysis. Your handwriting is your brain and your brain is you.

But Parkinson’s messes with all that. It turns off certain genes in the cells of the brain, no one knows why. This leads to decreased levels of a brain chemical called dopamine and to unusual electrical rhythms. Many physical actions are inhibited or mangled, like brushing one’s teeth or writing with the hand. But scriptural disintegration is just an image of the beginning of a cognitive breakdown whose gradual effects will include disorder, discontinuity, forgetting, gaps and fissures, slowdowns and stops. In The Brain that Changes Itself, the psychiatrist 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.

What I take from this is that 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 in a mess.

How to draw a line that is not stupid.

Cy Twombly, ‘Apollo and the Artist’ (1975)
© Cy Twombly Foundation. Photo: Mimmo Capone

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

‘In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,’ Theodor Adorno wrote in Essays on Music. As I am not keen on considering myself a catastrophe, let’s turn from late style to early style. The world’s earliest writing systems developed independently in four places: the Near East, Egypt, China and Mexico. All began as systems of counting or accounting – a way to keep track of goods or money. Later (i.e. thousands of years later) a concern for the afterlife paved the way for literature by using writing for funerary inscriptions. Death and property, you could say, two of our most basic anxieties, seemed able to be managed, or at least placated, by putting marks on a surface and so inspired the first systematic mark-making.

The psychology of one particular moment in this evolution interests me, the moment of transition from the realm of material things (goods and money) to that of words and ideas (poems about death). Let’s take ourselves back to 3500 BC and the kingdom of the Sumerians (present-day Iraq). Here people kept track of debts by counting out clay tokens and placing them in a clay envelope. To simplify matters, some accountants began marking the outside of the clay envelope to signify the number of tokens inside. Presumably the number of tokens inside the envelope would be exactly the same as the number of marks on the outside. But what if it wasn’t? Might there be room for mistakenness or even duplicity? At any rate, when the outside doesn’t match the inside, things may be going, or have gone, awry. That boundary is not so simple.

It’s possible I am overthinking this imaginary moment of early scripture. But it fascinates me that introducing a dialectic of inside and outside polarises the attributes of each and may so easily slide sideways into judgments of right and wrong, good or bad.

So let’s be a little more subtle about the problem of bad handwriting. It would seem to have two possible solutions:

1. perfect its craft so that the handwriting isn’t bad
2. disown the craft so that the badness doesn’t matter

John Keats, in his manuscripts, would be an example of the first way, the way of perfection. When publishing a volume of poems, Keats copied out the text in a hand so regular, flowing and confident it’s hard to believe he ever had a moment of doubt or despair at any point in the composition of the lines. Keats was a Romantic, an artist much concerned with self and selfhood. The sheer beauty of his fair copies seems a revelation, if not a celebration, of what he considers his own best self.

At the other end of the spectrum, consider Twombly. Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, his modernist conception of self and selfhood was quite different from Keats’s. He loved books and his inspiration was often literary; his paintings feature handwritten words inscribed in such a way as to avoid offering any clues to himself 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. You cannot get away from yourself in your own hand, I used to think, and yet Twombly does. In his essay, Barthes describes Twombly’s handwriting as ‘drifting between desire and politeness’, or (quoting the Tao Te Ching) the hand of ‘a man acting without expectation’.

How to draw a line that is not stupid.

Like certain other artists of the modern era Twombly seems to have been intent on leaving the self behind, evading the ego and its marks, positing emptiness as more interesting than presence. Twombly was best friends with John Cage, the composer of 4’33” and other ego-emptying artworks. As Cage put it, ‘something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.’ What Cage did was to introduce chance operations into his work. What Twombly did was to find his way to a handwriting that has no person in it. Critics sometimes refer to Twombly’s line as ‘graffiti-like’; I don’t think Twombly enjoyed hearing this. Graffiti is often ugly and usually, on some level, activist. Its character is that of ‘the egotistical sublime’, as Keats said of Wordsworth. I once asked the artist Tacita Dean about Twombly’s attitude to all this. She came to know him very well while making a 16 mm film about him. ‘For Cy,’ she said,

I always believed it was about the encounter and a bit like a medium with a Ouija board. When he’s in the moment, he cannot be interrupted (even by himself) or the connection is broken. When he’s in the moment, the encounter becomes the painting and nothing else matters.

This ‘moment’ is one that Barthes locates inside Twombly’s handwriting. Barthes remarks on the lightness of Twombly’s line, his impulse to ‘link in a single state what appears and what disappears; [not] to separate the exaltation of life and the fear of death [but] to produce a single affect: neither Eros nor Thanatos, but Life-Death, in a single thought, a single gesture’. And here is an interesting incidental fact about exaltation: when a Twombly painting called Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) was exhibited in Houston a few years ago, a guard found a Frenchwoman standing in front of the canvas totally unclothed. ‘The painting makes me want to run naked,’ she wrote in the guest book. Twombly was delighted. ‘No one can top that!’ he told the New York Times.

Let’s perk ourselves up with a random homonym and another brief poetic interlude.* I had a friend in Mexico, a composer named Guillermo, who wanted to compose an entire symphony out of the sound of people sighing:

Do you hear sighing.
     Do you wake amid a sigh.
           Radio sighs AM,
             FM.
               Shortwave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic.
           Hot sighs steam in the dawn.
    People kissing stop to sigh then kiss again.
Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed for ever.
        Flowers sigh and two noon bees float backwards.
               Is it doubt.
                  Is it disappointment.
                     The world didn’t owe me anything.
                         Leaves come sighing in the door.
                  Bits of girl sigh like men.
           Forgeries sigh twice.
Balthus sighs and lies about it, claiming it was Byron’s sigh.
        A sigh may come too late.
               Is it better than screaming.
                  Give me all your sighs for four or five dollars.
                                A sigh is weightless,
                     yet it may interrupt the broadcast.
                  Can you abstain.
          What is that hush that carries itself up each sigh.
        We hunt together the sigh and I,
sport of kings.
          To want to stop is beyond us.
The more sighs shine the more I’m in trouble – some kind of silvery stuff –
                        you thought it was the sea?

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’. Before that we find mention of a shaking disease in an Ayurvedic treatise from 10th-century BC India; and Galen, the ancient Greek doctor, noticed an affliction he called σκελοτύρβη, which charmingly might be translated as ‘revelry of limbs’. But it was not until the 20th century that neurologists came to think this revelry could be quieted by physical and mental action. That is, by physical exercise focused with deliberate and intense mental attention.

If the brain is plastic, as we now believe, it can be changed. 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. Its combination of difficult cardiovascular effort and deliberate focusing of the mind has proven to reduce the symptoms and slow the progress of the disease. Body and brain work together.

Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside the brain? Is it a noisy workroom or a silent laboratory? What does a sound sound like in there? I imagine it as a big boardroom with CEOs sitting around staring at their phones and sending one another texts. And the spookiest part is this: presumably they are all there in total darkness. Wouldn’t it be dark inside the brain? Where would light come from? And who would see it?

Anyway, going back to tremor: I brush my teeth with my right arm and right hand, where I have a tremor: the toothbrush therefore goes whamming up and down at a savage pace, colliding with lips and gums. This revelry of toothbrush is produced by electricity flowing along a nerve path. But a nerve path has a plane of action. If I concentrate and change the plane – by moving my arm up or down at an eccentric angle – I can interrupt the flow and still the tremor. Or if I grip the toothbrush handle tight I can master the shaking by intensity of focus. Concentration is key. I have to think into the motion. In my own brutal understanding of it, thinking makes (moves?) neurons.

A man called John D. Pepper made a similar discovery in managing his problems walking. Pepper, who died last year, is a bit of a hero, or at least a significant innovator, in the Parkinson’s community. He addressed 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. So whereas you would perform a complex action like walking or toothbrushing automatically, because the CEOs sitting around the boardroom in your brain are sending memos to one another making clear what each is supposed to do and when they’re supposed to do it, I have to stop and think and apply conscious control.

It is the opposite of the exalted state of Twombly seated at his painting. By engaging the conscious-movement technique Pepper was able to tame his tremor and other symptoms. He got Parkinson’s in his thirties and lived to be ninety. Pepper’s is not an entirely new discovery. Parkinson recorded in his case notes of 1817 that the patient he refers to as Case VI was able to interrupt his interminable shaking for a few minutes by a brief sudden deliberate movement.

Philosophically, there is something worthy of notice here, having to do with attention. When we bring an action out of habit and into consciousness we stir up a new perception of it. Inside and outside change places. Time shifts. Parkinson’s disease is always now. Or maybe we could say, the disease reminds us that life is now. At this point in my reasoning I bump into Gertrude Stein’s sentence from 1913, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,’ about which she herself made the following comment:

Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there … I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry in a hundred years.

Igo​ to 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 we’ve done warm-up and strength training and footwork drills) the coach yells: ‘Gloves on!’ We rush to the lockers for our boxing gloves, then station ourselves at a heavy bag and start punching. There are six basic boxing punches. Each has a number:

1. Jab
2. Cross
3. Hook with lead hand
4. Hook with rear hand
5. Uppercut with lead hand
6. Uppercut with rear hand

The central portion of a boxing class involves punching the heavy bag according to a combination of numbers called out by the coach. We each reproduce the punches that correspond to the numbers. It goes quite fast. I find that when I am trying to perform a complicated boxing combination I can feel the neurons in my brain struggling and striving. I know this sounds crazy. But, as we saw earlier, that boundary between inside and outside is not so simple.

The more I know about Parkinson’s disease, the more I see it as holding oneself upright 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 none of us will win 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, Pepper analysed it into nine segments of action and six targets of attention for each step he takes. The man was intense.

Before we leave the topic of striving, one more observation about boxing class. Putting on your first boxing glove is easy; putting on the second glove not so easy. Meanwhile the coach is yelling: ‘Don’t use your teeth!’ Conventional practice is to find someone at large in the gym and have them put on your second glove. As I’m a classics person, it strikes me that this whole situation – where one human being stands before another, lifting up their hands for help – has the same structure as the ancient ritual gesture called ‘supplication’, as when Priam comes to the tent of Achilles at the end of the Iliad and supplicates for the body of his son. And, in my boxing class, I observe that it is all but impossible, when someone else is putting a glove on your hand, to conjure up or worry about the black doorway.

Writing this essay in a notebook with a pencil has been a chastening exercise. The handwriting is partly legible. I do not achieve any John Cage-like liberation from the shackles of my self with this scrawl. The hand seems in fact all too much me.

Speaking of authenticity, though, here is one final interesting incidental fact: in the 1950s, Twombly was in the army and assigned to the cryptography division, where he spent a couple of years deciphering other people’s stupid lines on paper. Be careful how you read that clay envelope.

But, really, what difference does handwriting make? Almost everyone to whom I mentioned my worries about bad handwriting said something like: ‘Oh I’ve always had awful writing, no one in my family can read it and it’s gets worse over time; nowadays I do everything on a computer.’ Often when people say this they sound a bit sheepish. I wanted to get another angle on this sheepishness, so I decided to question composers about the difference between making a musical score by hand and using a computer program.

First, the American composer David Lang, who said that he began writing scores on a computer in the early 1990s, but always wondered what this might have changed in his composing, as he often uses lots of maths and graphs and charting of proportions, which are much easier to do on a computer. So in 2003 he decided to see what it would be like to return to the old ways. He wrote a piece called ‘this was written by hand’ using only a pencil and paper. I’ll quote him here:

I tried to make it as complicated and structured as the other music I was writing at the time, but I discovered that I no longer had the patience … so the piece ended up being a lot simpler. Then I had the idea that the music should only be published in a facsimile of my paper score, but when I tried to copy the music over neatly enough to publish it, by hand, I kept making mistakes and it became illegible, so I ended up copying it on my computer and publishing that version.

After Lang, I went to the Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, who took a very different view:

It’s a bit hard to describe, but I feel more in touch with the music, almost as if writing by hand has the same quality as playing. Or that the music is more real, not as generic as it sometimes seems when writing on the computer. I feel like each of the notes has an individual ‘personality’ when handwritten, and this can be exaggerated with different emphasis on size, shape or space of each note or passage.

After she had shown me some of her handwritten scores, María added a third angle to the whole situation by telling me that before she puts any notes on paper she makes a drawing that has neither notes nor words, just shapes and colours indicating her ideas for the work. She seemed diffident about mentioning these sketches; perhaps we are all uneasy with our own preverbal selves.

However that may be, no one seemed to construe the situation as a crisis of self or a test of character in the way I did. For this conviction I had to fall back on Confucius, not to mention Barthes’s inexhaustible question: how to draw a line that is not stupid?

At this point I felt I had exhausted aesthetics and turned to science, where there is a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that handwriting stimulates different and more complex brain connections than typing on a keyboard, connections essential to encoding new information and forming memories. The precisely controlled movements of handwriting lead to patterns in the brain that promote learning. The brain opens, deepens and enriches itself. There is in it (speaking subjectively) an exhilaration and a feeling of homecoming.

Homecoming brings us close to the end. Let’s finish with another bit of Catullus. This is a rough translation of a recently discovered and hitherto unknown fragment of text. It appears to take the form of an interview between the Roman poet and John D. Pepper:

John D. Pepper: Death.
Catullus: Death made me grow up.
John D. Pepper (henceforth Pepper): Love.
Catullus: Love made me endure.
Pepper: Malady.
Catullus: Malady does not rest.
Pepper: Passion.
Catullus: Passion bewildered me.
Pepper: Parsnips.
Catullus: Parsnips taste like violets.
Pepper: Violets.
Catullus: Violets smell like parsnips.
Pepper: Gods.
Catullus: Gods cause me to be silent.
Pepper: Bureaucrats.
Catullus: Bureaucrats make me melancholy.
Pepper: Tears.
Catullus: Tears are my sisters.
Pepper: Laughter.
Catullus: I wish I had a splendid laugh.
Pepper: Warfare.
Catullus: Ah, warfare.
Pepper: Humankind.
Catullus: Humankind is glass.
Pepper: Roses.
Catullus: I hate roses.
Pepper: The line.
Catullus: A line is just a lure.
Pepper: Why not take the shorter way home.
Catullus: There was no shorter way home.