the meaning of handwriting
Poor neglected blog. My 60+ hour work week has not been kind to you. Here is a solo performance piece that I wrote. I also performed it a couple of weeks ago, at a show with a bunch of very talented writer/performers. I was totally out of my comfort zone. There were over fifty people there (I was expecting maybe twenty, including my friends) and I was bricking it right up until the point where I got up on the stage, and then it seemed to go fine.
Our theme was the Research Topic. We each put a specialist subject in a hat and picked one at random. The result was that everyone had to go away and research something they knew nothing about and then incorporate that research into an autobiographical piece. My topic was the meaning of handwriting:
__________
Literally, it’s the most obvious thing in the world. It’s exactly what you would say if you had to make it up. It always just might be magic, but I am consistently disappointed. A broad-spaced hand with nice wide loops means you’re open-minded and personable. Heavy pressure on the pen means emotional intensity and a strong libido. A neat tight hand means you’re a neat tight kind of a person. A long life line means long life. A broken love line means broken love. The upper mound of Mars means some bullshit. Death never quite means Death, even when it’s upside down, but the Lightning-Struck Tower means HOLY FUCK DISASTER APPROACHING and I am disappointed nonetheless.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fucking genius. I’m a well-versed sceptic. I can read tarot, palms, runes, Elvish, Pokémon cards, probably minds, with varying degrees of proficiency. In yoga, I kind of believe them when they tell me my energy centres are opening and closing and lighting up in different colours, like elemental gems wedged somewhere between my pancreas and my upper-digestive tract. I can read the wry grin under my doctor-father’s moustache. Even when he’s not here, I see him raising his eyebrows at his sister as she sits on the edge of his hospital bed and tells him all about homeopathy. I hear him telling my doctor-mother that all these toxins people are constantly trying to flush out of their bodies with saunas and blueberries DO NOT EXIST, they are magic toxins, science does not support their existence!
Sometimes I flick through the Richard Dawkins books that live in a pile on the windowsill in the bathroom of my family home. Sometimes I see things that aren’t there.
There were a couple of months, a while back, when they were dead serious about adding a thirteenth sign to the zodiac. His name is Ophiucus, the Serpent Bearer. I realised this meant I was going to be shifted from Aries to Pisces. If you asked me for my sign in a bar, I would laugh at you out of it, but I’m still pretty resistant to the idea of being anything other than a bad-ass ram.
A small dangling lower loop means “you have a tendency or a trait by where you meticulously distinguish or separate a friend or close companion to the extent that you will exclude and reject others from the relationship. You may also be suggestible to object attachment or fetish.” I’ve known a few small dangling lower loops in my time. My long inflated lower loops indicate a double-dose of restlessness, a desire for change, for diversified company and activities, and even perhaps, at the core of it all, a rejection of reality. I say that seems about accurate. I get thrown back. I am a genius.
I mean, that’s not exactly what she said. It’s the sleepy week before we break for summer. She says I’m highly creative. No shit. Is it the scuffed hiking boots paired with mandatory navy-blue knee socks? Is it the crust of plaster and paint on the cuffs of the mandatory blue gingham shirt? Is it the fringe, streaked with oily blonde, hanging heavy over the mandatory acne-scarred forehead.
It seems kind of obvious, but I am the most obvious thing in the world. You are highly creative, she says, but ha ha, it’s very erratic, the way your upward strokes slant to the left, there’s no pattern, ha ha, that’s a sign of an unstable mind, you could a homicidal maniac, ha ha ha, that’s a joke, girls.
This is exactly what I want to hear. I am sixteen. I am special, but also a little bit dangerous. It’s not like my mother never washes my shirt. It’s not like I am precise or patient enough to use paint.
Graphology, apparently, pertains not just to handwriting, but to any kind of inscription we make with our hands on a surface.
I am susceptible to hypnotism. When I clap my hands, she tells me, when I clap my hands, you will wake up and you will know the whole future of this world and you will write it on the wall with your index finger. I jump at the clap and everyone is laughing, but I can barely hear them because waves of blister-bright clarity are crashing down around my ears. It’s all there in front of me, all I have to do is write it down. My index finger is not magic obviously and makes no mark on the wall. I grow distressed as I start to forget bits of the story, I mean, it’s relentless, it’s searing, this story, time is folding in on itself but I can only go forward, and I am biting my lip and sweating and searing and I have almost finished my third wall, from as high as I can reach down to the peeling skirting board before they realise that I am crying and shaking and no one is laughing and she grabs me firmly by the shoulder and says, “Sleep.”
I am twenty-three. At some point, I made a conscious decision, I corrected that erratic leftward slant and now my ‘bs’ and ‘ds’ stand bold and upright, herding lesser letters in front of them. I had to learn to print all over again when I got to college, because my joint-writing was a mad scrawl, but not in a mad-Picasso-moleskine-chic kind of way, not like a genius, more like a child who never learned how to hold the pen properly, cramped and cramping and slowing me down. It wasn’t practical for taking notes in lectures. I’ve weeded out most of the deformities, but I still drop my loops a full line, sometimes two and I have to contend with them later on, hoping the spacing will fall just right to dodge the engorged tails of my ‘gs’ and my vicious spiking ‘qs’. A friend once told me that this aspect of my handwriting makes her panic. I said that seems about accurate. I said it keeps me on my toes. Her writing is impeccably straight Victorian cursive. If you met her, this would be the most obvious thing in the world
Now, my handwriting is unapologetic and I am not afraid of ruining notebooks anymore, because I am a genius and one day they will find it and they’ll say, “Look at these powerful uppercase ‘Ms’ and these distinguished fully-formed vowels and the intrepid cross of every last ‘t’. Publish these scribbles and sketches immediately! A posthumous Pulitzer for these fragments of stories and the places where she shaded in the margins!”
I am eleven years old. I make my father climb a dubious stepladder to the ceiling of my narrow room, while I yell instructions based on the lush illustrations in my hardback copy of The Zoo in the Sky. I want the Ram and I want the Dragon, picked out in plastic glow-in-the-darks stars, to guard me while I sleep. We have three left over, so we make Orion’s belt over above my door. They will never find the lime-green diary tucked underneath my mattress, with its deformed loops and stunted clumps of vowels. They will never find it because I will burn it in a fit of dramatics when I am sixteen.
Once they hypnotised me and made me believe I was a tiny dragon. This is the most obvious thing in the world.