Her words

 

WRITING with a fountain pen should be a meditation. It is torture: I am back in the first grade, gnawing my upper lip and watching the nib, then my fingers, the right hand holding on to its dignity in the grip of the pen, and finally, the person ludicrously failing to flow with the pen. 

Jotting with ballpoint pens, pounding typewriters, and tapping gadgets have hardened muscle memory that rejects this medium for rumination. 

Why do I think of cows “ruminating” in pasture, chewing cud? The nib measures the spread of ink saturating the paper, the acquiescent blankness that is handmaiden to an unbovine rumination.

Or a list of items sent out for laundry. The tallying of books read and lines for savoring. Even in its ephemera, writing hints of an interior life. The nib leaves a bead that unspools into the person hovering behind the veils.

In the past, the hands of a maid were appropriated for everything except writing. Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera contrast the precolonial “mujer indigena” who, alongside men, composed the songs, poems, and oral lore passed on by the tribe against the silenced women of colonial times, when the printing press introduced by the Spaniards published no work attributed to a woman.

Not only were they denied education, the culture seeded doubt in women, who questioned whether they were worthy of picking up a pen. 

When a Sister Catherine was told to write down the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that she experienced in 1830, she viewed the task “with repugnance” and only did so out of obedience to M. Aladel, the Director of her community, the Daughters of Charity. 

“(S)he judged herself incapable of doing so, and, moreover, in her opinion, (writing) would have been contrary to humility,” goes the Archconfraternity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s account of St. Catherine Laboure who wrote not once but thrice to document the explicit supernatural visions recreated in the Miraculous Medal of Our Lady of Graces.

After the French nun’s death, Aladel decided not to publish the first account; the other two were made public.

Why was the first narration not published? What happened to this? Why, after waiting for 45 years before confiding to her Director, did she write three accounts?

“She was standing, clothed in a robe the color of auroral light,” Sister Catherine wrote in her extant notes of those Marian visions. So unexpected a harvest from a reluctant writer, its incandescence nevertheless casts in deeper gloom the rest of her words, lost to history. 

Photo of Mangyan woman etching the syllabary on bamboo, the traditional writing surface of precolonial times, was taken by Jacob Walse-Dominguez and sourced from his pinterest.ph account 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 29, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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)

The rescue

SURROUNDED by a phalanx of reporters and recorders, Presidential Assistant Michael Dino presented an unenviable sight before and after the Cebu Citizens-Press Council (CCPC) quarterly meeting.

But during the Aug. 18 meeting of the CCPC, where he was a guest, the Visayas alter ego of President Rodrigo Duterte mentioned a detail that made me curious.

He said that even before he has moved into his office at the Malacañang sa Sugbu, “half a sack” of letters is already awaiting.

I turned this fact over and over in my mind, wondering if I ever would receive such a bounty in my lifetime. When my boys—a husband and two sons—were younger, they wrote me letters, often with a drawing or two.

And then text and email came, followed by Hangouts and Facetime.

Also kept as keepsakes are the yellowed notes that a class presented me during one birthday. Now yellow and curling in a paper box covered with news articles, my students’ letters linger longer than the chocolate cake we shared.

Letters, of course, have different flavors. Mr. Dino implied that some of the letters may be divulging more names that may end up in a narcolist.

As a child, I woke up every morning to my late father’s favorite radio commentators reading aloud letters demanding official action. These were sent by “concerned citizens”.

The current War on Drugs and the lengthening “Kill List” stain the civic letter-writing of old with a repute that puts it more in league with medieval plots, wily whispers, and Judas kisses.

More than political vagaries, technology accounts for the dramatic decline of letters. Reading the missives drafted by students for news sources, I am appalled at times to discover how the curtness, informality and self-entitlement of instant messaging and Tweets have turned the letter into a Frankenstein creation of mismatched intentions and expression.

So Education Secretary Leonor Briones’s decision to continue the “Salamat Po (Thank You) Letter Writing Project” on its fourth year should be celebrated by all those who believe there is more to communication than composing and reading “Wer U :-)”.

The Department of Education (DepEd) and the Philippine Postal Corp. (Philpost) will award P50,000 to a student who mails at any post office a handwritten letter to any person he or she is grateful to.

Written in Filipino or English and using the proper format, every letter sent locally entitles the student to a raffle coupon. If sent abroad, the letter writer receives two raffle tickets.

Prizes of P10,000 will be given to students, as well as to their teachers and schools, in the semi-grand draw on Mar. 15, 2017. The grand winner will be announced on April 2017, also the Philpost anniversary.

I would have preferred that the contest involves reading and selecting the winning letters. Other stakeholders have to take up the slack to get more than the luck of the draw to restore the lost art of writing letters.

For instance, will newsrooms recognize the most unforgettable letters written by the public? Do editors still print a letter that’s handwritten? Who has the patience to untangle penmanship?

Letter-writing, penmanship—what else is for the rescue?



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 21, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Script for life

NOTEBOOKS punctuate our learning more than we expect.

When a school year begins, we weigh down our shopping basket with this classroom staple: 90 or 100 leaves, sewn or spiral, iconic white-as-a-blank-tablet or politically correct recycled sepia.

At the end of the year, I see the notebooks again to weed out the used from the unused pages. When the boys were in the lower years, I recycled the remaining clean sheets to jot down grocery lists or mathematical exercises.

But as they grew older, the boys seemed to use fewer pages until it seemed, at the end of the school year, the notebooks looked as mint as they were when the year was about to start.

It’s not a surprise. Homework, readings, news, chitchat, photos, research, music, videos—from the Web unwinds the spool of their wired lives.

Computers, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones: the young will sooner be parted from the womb than from the electronic extensions of their identity.

Will the digital age banish the notebooks of old to the trash-crammed pockets of last year’s knapsack?

I hope not. Notebooks, with their leaves of paper, are the spaces where we learn how to write. Recent research has psychiatrists and neuroscientists asserting that writing by hand lets children read more quickly and communicate more expressively.

In a June 2, 2014 article, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” Maria Konnikova of The New York Times reported that a University of Washington study of children in grades two through five showed that those who composed text by hand produced more words and ideas than those typing on a keyboard.

In brain imaging, those with better handwriting showed greater activation of neural activity in areas associated with reading, writing and memory.

Other studies showed that, over tracing and printing letters, cursive writing has an edge, such as training self-control. This is food for thought for parents whose five- or six-year-olds are quicker than their elders to swipe and activate their personal tablets as soon as they are seated.

At the very least, it’s an argument favoring eateries with paper placemats that challenge adults to unscramble letters and their children to doodle while waiting for pizza.

The scientific link between penmanship and communication is even more significant for public school students. Reportage about the first day of classes this week has generally been dismal and frustrating: cramped classrooms, “alternative” classes where learning is dubious, even chairless classrooms.

In one TV report, primary students were sprawled on their sides or tummies, writing in notebooks. Chairs had yet to be delivered.

While the situation sorely tests the students’ endurance, not to mention legibility, the exercise with paper and pencil prepares them for a principle proven in laboratories and classrooms: writing by hand helps a person process a lecture and reframe it in his or her words.

According to The New York Times article, perfecting the art of penmanship in childhood benefits the adult’s skills in comprehension, encoding, reflection and memory. A Yale psychologist who is unconvinced by the link between handwriting and learning did admit that “(handwriting) maybe… helps you think better”.

I remember comparing research skills then and now with a college librarian. She said the Internet may have helped students come up with more pages in their theses. Yet, she observed that teachers have to work harder to review manuscripts for plagiarism.

I said the copy-and-paste garden variety of plagiarism must save a lot of library books from losing their pages. She retorted: still doesn’t mean there’s a lot of reading going on. Aye, that’s the rub.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 8, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”