Handwriting Is Physical Visual Thinking

Language, specifically writing and speech, is a technology that is implanted in our bodies. The words we use are the symbolic code that approximately represents the thinking of our hand and muscle.

The hand and its method of thinking draw words into the body. Handwriting as movement creates the thought that it inscribes. Certainly, the motion of handwriting has an effect on the thought itself. The operation of the hand movement is critical to the thought. The body is quicker than its thoughts, and our hand knows the word before we can read it. The cognitive flashing rhythm between alphabet, hand, and thought is itself a thinking process. We communicate as a negotiation among the speed of thought, the rhythm of writing, and the immediacy of speech.

Writing is the unfortunate taming of the wild nature of thinking. I say unfortunate because of the failure of our hand searching for a translation for the thought and the facsimile that it ultimately produces. We sense the disruption between the idea and the word mediated by the motion of writing. The poetics of an idea when it first occurs to the body is often lost through its conversion to language. Order is a curse to thought.

The thoughts that go with these words were originally a free-flowing convolution of multiple volcanic influences. Writing organizes the tumult and erases some of its power. There is a permeable membrane between the inside and the outside. Skin and language are part of the membrane. The physical work of writing by hand is an aggregate of movement, its relationship to words, pencil, paper, time, space, and its relationship to active thinking. And the words we do not choose to speak. And the words we do not choose to write.

Identifying the distinct linear flow of our love’s handwriting summons myriad significance in the moment of our thinking about its content. Handwriting supports this other poetic context. The text becomes an instant history and references experience beyond its limited words. It refers back to the glorious chaos of fleshy thought. That phenomenon also happens in the moment of our writing. Remember the pleasure of your hand making the rhythmic curve of the letter or feeling the tooth of the paper biting the graphite of the pencil.

My eyes go right to the handwritten lines on this page. These lines remember the chaos of the thought and the moving events that brought the thought to the body. It is remembering more of the event through its visual score. It is a drawing. If you have a pencil, there is room at the bottom of this page for you to write.

I am typing right now. I am familiar with how convenient it is for my fingers to touch a key on my computer keyboard. How much easier it is for you to read. How much more I can compact into a line. How I like using both hands and the symmetry and synchronization of fingers that allows me to spell the word synchronization. The hand-inspired-thought phenomenon is still engaged with a keyboard, but the hand motions are now general rather than specific. I sense which button to push on the space grid of the keyboard. It requires singular sharp punctuations rather than a linear flow. I am familiar with how this has changed the way I think. But I am still thinking. My hands in relationship with the keyboard grid technology also produce thoughts. There is an accuracy that comes from the speed of this process. It corrects my grammar but sometimes destroys its poetics. Maybe I could say that my words can catch up with my thoughts since I can type faster and more legibly than I can write by hand. But of course some of these concerns are about word processing as opposed to thought processing or writing.

The visual result of writing is also a part of the whole. There is a big difference between the typed line pressed into a grid and the free-flowing calligraphic line of handwriting. The strict grid-like alignment of the typed words on this...