Cacography

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Although writing is an ancient invention, the Western tradition of personalised handwriting is essentially another product of the Renaissance's implicit agenda of subversive individualism.  Before that time, the main writing establishments, the medieval scriptoria, allowed no latitude in letter forms: to learn how to write meant to learn how to reproduce exactly the local variant of the uncial script, for example.  Variations were errors, not expressions of personality.  For this reason palaeographers typically talk of schools of writing, centred around a particular monastery, rather than of scribes.

Gradually, as writing became more widespread through an increasingly secularised Europe, the Church's grip on literacy - hitherto one of its jealously-guarded mysteries and sources of power - weakened.  With this centralised orthodoxy gone, personal writing styles began to evolve.

The teaching of writing in present-day schools mirrors this process.  At first, we are shown precisely how to produce each letter: there is a premium on exactitude.  Once the basic shapes have been learnt, though, there is a shift away from studying letters to using them.  Thereafter, provided the handwriting style is reasonably unobtrusive children are judged on what they write, not how they write it.

Through constant practice we can bypass the mental mechanics of writing.  Because the focus is on content not form, the latter evolves almost spontaneously and according to deep personal laws.  Mostly the process is a gradual evolution, but it can change quite dramatically and disjunctively.  One day as I was writing I watched with horror as I formed an 'x' not from a 'c' and its mirror image, placed back to back, but from two straight diagonal lines slashing through each other.  I have never relapsed, and I often wonder what terrible psychic shift occurred then.

The Surrealists were therefore almost correct when they saw in automatic writing - words written without thought - a revelation of the soul's innermost nature, but they erred in regarding what was written as important; in fact, the shapes of the letters tell all.

People's handwriting, considered purely graphologically, seems so revealing in its diversity; the big, brassy letters of the extrovert, the tiny, self-effacing embroidery of the recluse; the extravagant curlicues, the vertiginous slants - both forwards and backwards - the bizarre open dots of 'i's - all seem to be such manifest and true expressions of their writers' personalities.

Frightening, then, those handwritings that seem almost typeset, with effortless and sensuous curves, balanced shapes and a neatness which suggests obsession.  Such calligraphy bespeaks a perfection outside humanity, either angelic, or demonic.  Frightening, too, those hands that look the product of a deranged mind, illegible, ill-formed, spastic in their irregularities, now a series of jagged edges, now meaningless waves.  And doubly frightening for me who writes in just this way, exposing to the world the terrible implications of that blatant cacography.

(1989)

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Spot the similarity

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It has happened to all of us.  From a distance we see the back of someone's head; it looks familiar.  Unsure, though, we move closer, trying to take a better look.  They walk with a gait we know so well; we see their body with all its characteristic rhythms and tics.  We catch a glimpse of their face: yes, it is them, that old lover we have not seen for years.  The electricity is still there, the faint trembling, the ache in the pit of the stomach.  And yet...is the shape quite right?  And surely they never had that mole...?  Or: we see a face across a room; is that old Johnnie?  We stare, half-indiscreetly, half-covertly, caught between a desire to make contact and fear of the mistake.  The eyes and the mouth are the same, the way he lifts his glass identical; and yet...

It is disconcerting to see these impostors - doubly disconcerting because they are so good.  We were right to be wrong: they do look almost identical.  Our confidence is shaken, not only in our ability to recognise - old age and fading memories alone would account for that loss - but also in the uniqueness of the people we have met.  

When we see these simulacra, especially if we encounter more than one of them, we begin to realise that perhaps there are only a limited number of permutations of eyes and noses and chins, the results of a genetic Identikit.  The details may differ, but then so have the details of their lives to this point; the underlying bone-structure, flesh cover, and colouring are in essence the same.

Physical repetition is worrying enough, but what if this circumscribed range of possibilities extended to the mental sphere too?  The characters of friends, family and lovers - those wonderful qualities that seemed so unique and so uniquely given to us - they too may be closely matched by other look- and think-alikes.  What then of our special relationships - special with respect to what?  To an entire class of matching people?

Worse follows.  When we spot these coincidences of form in other people, we concede readily that sometimes the resemblances are startling; but if for a moment a friend or colleague suggests a similar correspondence of a third party - an acquaintance, a stranger even - with ourselves, the defences go up.  The suggestion is preposterous, the proponent is clearly a fool or a knave.  We protest overmuch because what applied to our loved ones applies equally to us: that we might not be unique in outward form or even in what, or in who, we are.

We can truthfully deny these parallels because we better than anyone know our superficial details: no one else has seen us so often, gazed at us in the mirror so much.  For the same reason we spot supposed likenesses between friends and passers-by: we know the one reasonably well, the other not at all; we are ready to note the points of contact, and are blind to the tinier clashes.  In its most extreme form, this knowledge mismatch accounts for the Westerner's inability to tell some Chinamen apart: to do so, the language of their faces must first be learnt.  In other words, whether we or our friends really are duplicated by others comes down to a question of degree.  How similar does similar have to be to matter?

(1989)

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What masterpiece?

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On December 22, 1808, a small private concert was held in the Theater an der Wien in Vienna.  It was bitterly cold, and as the under-rehearsed musicians sat in front of the sparse audience they rubbed their hands together and blew on their numb fingers.  The concert that was about to begin consisted of the following programme: the sixth symphony in F, the recitative and aria 'Ah! perfido', the Gloria from the Mass in C, the fourth piano concerto, the fifth symphony, the sanctus from the Mass in C and the Fantasia for piano, chorus and orchestra.  All of them were conducted and performed by the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven.  All the works were receiving their first public performance.  It would be the greatest concert in the history of western music.

Did that audience know this as they sat shivering through the long and gruelling programme?  It seems hard to believe that they could have failed to be overwhelmed by works such as the fifth symphony, whose opening unison challenge has now burnt itself into the collective memory of the world.  And what of the first performance of the ninth symphony, some years later?  Surely the audience then realised they were listening to the zenith of orchestral and symphonic music?

It is too easy for us naively to imagine ourselves at those first nights, and too difficult to appreciate the music's full pristine impact.  For we would come with our ecstasy and adulation ready prepared; our ears would not be innocent.  As a guide to what those early audiences heard and felt, we have to look for analogues in our own experience.  How often, for example, have we attended the first performance of a modern work, and known - as certainly as we know now that the ninth symphony is a towering achievement - that we are part of a unique and important occasion, one -  like that day in 1808 - that will go down in history?

I have attended at least one such historic occasion.  It was at a Promenade concert, during a long hot summer several years ago.  It was the first British performance of Tippett's 'Mask of Time', a work he had been labouring over for many years, and one which promised to be the summation of all that he had attempted in his richly creative life.  I had assumed that since it was a contemporary work I would be able to turn up just before the start and buy a good seat.  In fact, the concert was sold out when I arrived, so I went to the back of the long queue of promenaders. 

Eventually I reached the ticket desk; by now, even the arena was full, and so I was forced up to the gallery.  There promenaders wandered like lost souls across the echoing floors and through the deep gloom.  Down below me in the auditorium the choir and orchestra looked like toys.  At last the music began.  The sounds seemed to reach us minutes later.  My feet soon ached, it was hot and stuffy, my head hurt; the music was clearly the work of a madman.  I left after about a quarter of an hour.

A couple of years later, I listened to the work on records.  From the first chords it gripped me: I knew it instantly for one of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces.  I also knew how that audience of 1808 had probably felt.

(1988)

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The profit of the beard

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Why do men grow beards? 

Passive acquiescence apart, we have at the very least the Everest explanation: because it is there.  Growing a beard is unanswerable proof that you can grow a beard; until then, however hirsute you may be, your beard is only potential, and therefore possibly feeble and risible.  And since time immemorial weak beards have by association been equated with those unable to grow them at all - the eunuchs, whose smoothness, that terrible facial absence, is their sad badge of manly dishonour.  To grow a beard is to wear a blazon, to throw in the world's face your face with its manifest masculinity.

Beards are not pure machismo.  On the contrary, there is a strong element of coquetry to them, a concern with the minutiae of appearance that in other contexts would be tagged dismissively as effeminate.  Men affect to despise such pre-occupations, but in reality they simply have less scope for them than women.  Given that make-up for Western men remains without social sanction, there are only two elements of the male visage that allow any latitude for acceptable personal flamboyance: cranial and facial hair.

  
Ordinary hair theoretically offers endless possibilities, and a wide range of tonsures is indeed found.  But here Nature plays a cruel trick on millions of men: their very masculinity, as measured by the hormonal rush of testosterone which courses through their veins every adult moment, undermines the premise and promise of the proud mane with a dreaded condition sometimes hidden under that terminological toupee, alopecia.  Or, to put it baldly, baldness.  Where women may express themselves with awe-inspiring concoctions of hair until late dotage, men are often reduced at an early age to shiny-pated skulls, fit only for phrenologists' models.

But even the headiest brew of the body's chemicals seems to leave the beard unscathed.  Hence the hordes of bearded, balding men: the one compensates for the other.  It also allows them the luxury of variegated styles: their hair may be gone or going, but they can still choose from a glorious gnathic gamut.  There are bushy beards, beards of stubble, beards combed up or down; Charles I beards, moustachioed and moustacheless beards; goatees, mandarins, beards to the chin and beards down the neck; long, white wizard beards and curious little beards shaved like an 'O' about the mouth.  And beyond these, there are shapes and styles without a name, marvellous idiosyncratic variations on the theme of bristles.

With this variety comes the possibility of change.  It is striking how women are re-animated and even re-juvenated simply by an alteration of hair-style; with the new image comes a sense of new possibilities, of a sloughing-off of old cares with old looks.  A beard gives a man the same luxury, that of re-making himself, of surprising the world.

Finally, there is the supreme treat - one denied to all women however well-endowed they are with gorgeous, silken tresses and a pampering panoply of attendant hairdressers  - available only to the man who has grown a beard: the simple, unforgettable experience of shaving it off.

(1989)

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