Handmade Beauty
by Joshua Sturgill
Feast of St Jason and Sosipater the Apostles of the 70 and Their Companions
Anno Domini 2020, April 29
I’VE BEEN
told that cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in public schools.
This alarms me for many reasons, though I’m sure it’s all explained as progress, as new teaching methods, as a push for STEM-based competitive curricula. But the real reason for removing handwriting from classrooms is, I suspect, much more sinister: our increasing discomfort with Beauty.
Beauty and uniqueness go hand in hand. Beauty loves repetition, but not uniformity. She wants variations on themes, not blue-grey mimeographs. Beauty resides in the unique quality of a person’s handwriting. Maybe this is to see Her “through a glass darkly”—but a dim reflection is infinitely greater than an electronic approximation. It’s the difference between Virtue and virtual.
Beauty is not something that can be reduced to slogans or electronically transmittable forms. Beauty speaks on too many levels simultaneously for reduction. Of course, there are push-backs against electronic uniformity—from the small-farm movement to the gender-fluidity movement—but unless these are grounded in a love of beauty, they will likely become just as commodified and commercialized as the mass-production they are attempting to avoid.
The act of handwriting, its grounding in Beauty, is irreplaceable. Handwriting involves the collaboration of the individual creative mind with the whole of an ancient written language. It can become a craft and a relationship between a writer and reader. You might ask how this is different from sending an email—or reading a blog post. Besides the obvious—that handwriting leaves a mark on the physical world—I believe it also leaves a mark within the persons involved in the creation and communication of the writing.
When the Internet is down, I may still type on my computer. When the electricity is off, I may still write with pen and paper. If I have no paper, likely I still have graphite or ink. With none of these, I have nothing but my mind, my hand and perhaps a stretch of sand—or a piece of charcoal, or a stone and chisel.
What I am thinking of here is the possible series of interventions between myself and the result of my labor. The more interventions, the less the labor is mine and the more it belongs to the intervening media. This, I believe, is why television shows and commercials tend to be so much alike. Why canned food tastes canned. Why Google can give you a list of stock suggestions for email replies.
And why thousands of “bots” can have social media accounts with no one able to tell the difference.
There are still those who love a good (handwritten) letter, still those who journal, still those who think on paper first and then transfer to type. They have experienced how handwritten thoughts are different. The thinking is different because the body is involved differently. We think from the body as well as the soul—and “thinking” may largely be a dialogue between the two. Descartes was off his rocker when he said that the mind-things (res cogitans) and the body-things (res-extensa) were separate. They are possibly distinct, but never separate—the way New Mexico is distinct from Colorado.
To write a letter or a diary entry is to create a work of intimate art. An email, however, is grimly pragmatic. And a text message borders on the barbaric. I often think that our socially embedded image of the cave man grunting at his fellows has nothing to do with our ancestors and everything to do with our use of technology. We are becoming primitives who live in little hand-held caves and throw pictographs (emoticons) at each other with decreasing communicative effect.
Others are saying similar things right now. There are excellent books on the subjects of internet-brain, social-media-syndrome, teenage-cell-use. But I think the simplest, best sign of decay is the loss of the art of handwriting. Loss of literacy will follow. Then critical thinking. All of this is a flight from Beauty.
Beauty cannot save the world if we deliberately make ourselves unable to respond to her call. This post started as a conversation, where I first heard about changes in the public school. Then, I wrote thoughts down in a notebook. What you’re reading now came from those physical thoughts. The Internet is now involved; it brings them to you in some form. But if you read and remember and consider—and perhaps write your own thoughts—only then will we have justified the Internet. More than likely, these words, within reach of many, will actually reach no one. And of the few that read, few will remember.
Handwriting lessons train children in tradition, craft, expressiveness. Beginning from repetition, they will become unique persons who are yet able to share a common language:
Beauty and memory.
Memory and craft.
Craft and connection.
There are rich mysteries in these human endeavors we may never recover if we lose the ability to write beautifully.
Joshua Alan Sturgill
is a former Vice-President of Eighth Day Institute and a graduate of Sangre de Cristo Seminary. His eleven-year association with Eighth Day Books provided frequent opportunities for lectures on literature, iconography, and Orthodox theology at universities, conferences, and churches. He recently earned his B.A. and M.A. from St. John's College and is back in Wichita working at Eighth Day Books. He spends as much time as possible reading and hiking.
*Originally posted at darklybrightpress.com
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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