Penmanship

WHAT lurks behind the banal? Recently, the librarian made an observation after I handed to her the borrower’s cards to take out books.

Did I have a tough time learning to write such a long name? she asked.

Learning to write in script must have slowed me down in grade school since I was always bringing home classmates’ notebooks to copy the notes that the teachers erased before I could finish.

In high school, when classmates borrowed my notes more often than I did theirs, I remembered their grumbling that they could hardly read my penmanship.

Legibility is the hallmark of perfect penmanship, so we were inducted. Yet, intrinsic to character, penmanship is anything but uniform and remote. We write first to ourselves, if we write to anyone.

Generations of students have commented about my penmanship. The braver souls complain; the sentimental ones don’t throw away their drafts, which they say “drip” with the comments I pen in red ink.

Whether as teacher, editor or reader, scribbling on the margins of text is hardly vandalism or graffiti art: we are not declaring to a public but writing for ourself.

In Ha Jin’s short story, “Broken,” Shen Manjin, driven to rise in the Communist Youth League Section, stays after office hours to practice his penmanship.

“(T)he Political Department always needed cadres who could write well,” Ha Jin prefaces the vigor with which Manjin applies to his overtime exercises, anticipating a future when he will lead over a hundred branches of the Youth League and its more than five thousand railroad workers.

For two friends at the turn of the nineteenth century, penmanship was a test of devotion. Best friends forever (BFFs) Karl and Friedrich were as thick as thieves, once spending 10 days together, just talking.

When Karl died, only 11 people turned up. Yet Friedrich made it possible for his BFF’s life’s work, the outputs of day after day of researching in the Reading Room of the British Museum, to be published after Karl’s death.

The second and third volumes of “Capital” by Karl Marx was “stitched together” by Friedrich Engels from “hundreds of pages of scrawled-over drafts,” writes Louis Menand in an Oct. 10, 2016 article in “The New Yorker”.

“(Marx had spectacularly bad handwriting; Engels was one of the few people outside the family who could decipher it.)”

Whether as handmaiden to the seismic but invisible changes in a life or eyewitness to a body of ideas changing a world, handwriting is the ultimate subversion, proof that the personal is potent and enduring.


* First published in the September 3, 2017 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)