i’m pretty sure the art of letter-writing has all but been abandoned by my generation. after college there were a few attempts amongst friends to send hand-written letters, but those were few and far between, and with one recent exception, it’s been years since anyone has hand-written me a letter now. even my grandfather, who wrote a letter to each of his five grandkids every week for all the years we were away from home for college and beyond, he too switched to email about five years back.* i’m not complaining, mind you, because in this modern world we have email and facebook and twitter and cell phones and text messages and blogs and as a result i talk to so many more far-off friends than i would if we had only the post as a means of communication. the same thing that bugged me about my own hand-written letters – their imperfections, my inability to edit and tweak the language after i’d written it – are the same things that make me totally cherish letters i receive.
handwriting is like fingerprints; no two people have exactly the same writing, and the shape of the characters speak of so many things: years of schooling, an impatience with or attention to detail, an aesthetic, the emotional state of the writer, the time of day or place or writing surface, even the physical musculature of the writer. it’s all in there. there’s something so personal (and increasingly rare) about something penned in a person’s own unique writing. the handwritten letter is like an artifact from someone’s life, that paper, that pen, that moment is captured and preserved in the paper in a way that defies the world of electronic communication. the drip of diner coffee hastily wiped off, the slightly greasy stain from writing on the kitchen counter, the worn edge where the letter, half finished, served as a bookmark for the writer between paragraphs.
in the tradition of japanese calligraphy, the qualities of each line on the paper reveals the state of the artist’s spirit. to paint a single stroke correctly, the student of calligraphy must be completely focused, centered, their breathing controlled, energy concentrated in the hara. the trained eye can see when all is not centered; the line is weak, the ink turns grey and thin, the line does not have the robust energy it should. i imagine that probably everything we do/make/create might reveal the same things about us if were trained to see them; without a focus of spirit and intent, nothing we do holds the same meaning. the intention is revealed in the form and qualities of a thing.
*i’d always know when his computer was broken, because i’d receive an envelope in the mail that was his email, printed out and folded up and mailed.
