From Handwriting to Eternity

As an art form, the blog has extraordinary possibilities. It’s a “magic theatre: entrance not for everybody”. Anybody may come and peek, but those for whom it’s not intended will swiftly move on. This theatre’s producer—I mean the blog author—may put on a new show every day, or hardly ever. In the public imagination the “weblog”, now simply known as the blog (both words still rejected by Blogger’s own spell-checker) is a space for the brief and gaudy flowering of newsy content: perhaps world news, or just what’s new within the author’s horizon. What you see day to day is liable to be displaced any time by a newer entry and consigned to an archive of past exhibits, filed by date or topic. So it’s not just a fluttering ephemera but also a natural history museum of past efforts, past enthusiasms.

Ephemera: An insect that (in its imago or winged form) lives only for a day. In
modern entomology the name of a genus of pseudo-neuropterous insects
belonging to the group Ephemeridæ (Day-flies, May-flies).—OED

Like many self-styled writers I once embraced the notion that a book-length book, preferably within hard covers, was the way to go. I had even chosen my publisher: Faber & Faber. I never dared test if they would choose me. It’s not that I have downsized my ambition since then. It’s simply the happy realization that the blog format suits me perfectly; or else that I’ve adjusted to its constraints, reframed them as virtues. I reject the printed book’s pretensions to completion and finality. My entries are essays, successive attempts to convey something, or at any rate to undergo something in the various processes involved in composition. The public imagination may see the blog as a spontaneous expression, like its baby brother, Twitter. They are not wrong. Within written literature, it approaches, but can never quite reach, the danger of live performance. I was recently invited to recite something from this blog on stage at a “Quiet Night Out” at our local arts centre. I said “yes”, until I thought about it later.

Arthur Stace was a scamp, a wastrel, a war casualty, a drunk, a tramp. He was also Sydney’s most famous author, even though he never had a book published and was so illiterate he could barely write his own name. But Stace—“a little bloke, just five foot three inches tall, with wispy white hair” according to Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney—was also, “a shy mysterious poet… whose work was just one single mighty word”. One word. But, as artist Martin Sharp observed: “Arthur Stace wrote an entire novel in that word.” (from http://www.au.timeout.com/sydney/the-bridge/features/1235/arthur-stace)

Within my blog, I contemplate Eternity. I think that’s my one constant topic. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”, said Blake in his Proverbs of Hell, themselves productions of time which he engraved on copper plates. So it is fitting that my own process is similarly laborious, involving old-fashioned pen and ink, and a great deal of silence in between. To produce an ephemera, such as a May-Fly or Day-fly, there’s a four-stage metamorphosis: ovum, larva, pupa and imago. I require no less than that delicate creature for this particular “production of time”.

Writing by hand can be a meditation on Eternity; which inevitably brings me to speak of Arthur Stace, and his own metamorphosis.

His one word was Eternity, and he wrote it in chalk, in perfect copperplate-style handwriting, on the sidewalks of Sydney. He went on doing it for years in secret, till a journalist caught him at it. I can empathize with Stace, for Eternity’s a word which can induce a world-stopping moment, a subliminal satori, a moment sub specie aeternatis. Yes, I like the long words, the Latin and Greek ones, but I aspire to no more than Stace, himself sans Twitter, sans Blogger, sans education. I write in chalk every day on a section of kitchen wall done in blackboard paint: reminders and shopping lists mainly, but the act itself is joyful. It takes me back to my first schoolroom writing, on a slate with chalk; soon followed by copybooks, first traced in pencil, then in ink. We were taught “copperplate”, that is, to write in a flowing hand the whole word without lifting the chalk or the pen-nib. Then we would cross the t’s and dot the i’s.

It is only the sense of “I”, dotted, dotty or otherwise, that holds us back from dwelling in Eternity.

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The top illustration evokes a scene from The Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse. Acknowledgements to http://macphisto-thefly.blogspot.co.uk/

Andrew Marr’s programme “Start the Week” on Monday was on “The Dying Art of Handwriting”. You can download it here. It was a joy to find others who voiced so well my own vague thoughts on the subject.

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