Stormy Waters

So.
Last week I went on a cruise from Kiel to Oslo. And forgot my diary in the cabin.
Those pages are a written testament from the moment I left SA, with all the trips, concerts, emotions and thoughts in between recorded in it. I realise full and well it is just paper, it is not the thing of most monetary worth that I could have lost. Yet it matters, because it cannot be replaced. I try to remember what I wrote down. The drawings I did of the covered Muslim ladies at Doha airport with their very fancy footwork. The questioning of whether the winter depression will ever end, whether depression can truly be linked to the darkness outside and is not simply a consequence of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Late night notes on a full moon admired from my bedroom window. Little trips to Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam. Drawn maps of places where I didn't have internet. Daily anecdotes on the long vacation back home. All these words, lost.

I've had diaries since childhood. In a box at my mother's house a dozen or more are gathering dust. Perhaps each of us has something that saves us, something that makes sense when everything else does not. For the one it may be a form of exercise, for another it may be escaping into WoW or League of Legends or some other alliterated game. It may be a person or a pet or dancing to 'Lotus Flower' when you are alone. Yet (I assume) we all need to flee our minds and our environments at times. And that is what these diaries have provided: a safe space to make sense of things. Not even to make sense so much, rather to release the jumbled mess in my brain onto the neat lines of a page. The written word, the word written in my handwriting, makes the bad and the good better.

My aunt asked me last year why I write. What is the reason to sit down, whether it be in front of a computer or a blank page or a diary or a typewriter or whichever other device you may choose, and to start pouring the words onto paper?

The answer is simple: there is nothing else. It is not about being read by others (although naturally one also wants to be read) or about creating the next great novel or changing the world. This writing is a chance to be selfish, to give all of myself to myself. It is a chance to see how I have changed over the years, how what seemed like mountains at the time could be conquered. It is a testament to the past, stemming from the fear that something might be forgotten. It is writing with my fountain pen when most things are typed these days. It is collecting tiny snippets of concert tickets and everyday conversations. It is knowing that words matter.



Quite fitting: this Scrabble ad. "There's magic in words". Indeed.

Block und Bleistift

According to the National Geographic(the July 2012 issue, p. 28), cursive is dying out. In 2010, a survey showed that "85 percent of collegians printed when they wrote", and that as of this year, teachers focus on teaching their students how to type, not how to write in cursive.

I remember learning how to write cursive, how the letters needed to touch specific lines in our exercise books and how, in Grade 3, we started drawing little hearts and circles instead of the i-dots. I remember getting my first Lamy fountain pen, in blue. It is still the pen of choice when writing exams that take three hours.

Even if my handwriting is deemed illegible, I like it. Everything is so nicely bound, every word a little unit, tied by the cursive connectors, stitched, flowing, growing into something of meaning. How can cursive be dying out? The article states that all writing is, in fact, becoming outdated. It is true, no one really writes anything out any more. We type emails, not letters. We even type and print out letters. I mean, think about how often you still write things down? Even note-taking in class is increasingly done on laptops and ipads and whatever else. We WhatsApp, BBM, and sms to communicate. It is the sign of progress, but also a sign of loss.

My Afrikaans grandmother's handwriting is minuscule. My German grandmother's u's have a little line over them to distinguish them from her n's. My father's handwriting presses through to the next few pages clearly. My sister's handwriting is very straight and orderly and legible. My mom and I sign the 'zsch' at the end the same way. My friend Gunda's handwriting looks like it is always smiling. I know it is you writing without having to look at the name.

Cursive might be slowly disappearing, and I understand that legibility is important, but our handwriting is our fingerprint on the page. No Calibri, no Helvetica, no Times New Roman can replace that. It will be a sad day when handwriting becomes a rarity. Just look at these beauties:

Do you recognize your own?