we tore the sheet from the pad, brushed against the grain of the paper with our fingertips, blew across its surface, aligned it on the desk, ached with the pressure of the pen
against the finger joint, the ridge the bauble of writers’ gristle under the
surface indented, ink smudged skin, inked smudged paper, the sticky clot of ballpoint tip
the rasp of graphite, a kindly determined touch, like playing scales to begin,
tracing the shape of a name a date a salutation, feeling it
The physicalness of writing by hand. I discovered when I first started learning Sanskrit that drawing / writing by hand made a massive difference to remembering the shapes, recognising them and more. It's the playing scales of language.
ReplyDeleteThat's excellent. Kind of Martian!
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