Hand Writing
At a stall at Paarden Eiland market, I find some ink wells dating to the early 1900s, around the time Woolf Beinart would have arrived in South Africa. I start talking to the guy who runs the stall, who tells me that 5 million bottles of ink a week would have been produced around that time, disposable glass or pottery bottles stoppered with wax. He says the ink would have been made from gall nuts, growths on oak trees, mixed with iron salts. As the ink oxidised, it became darker.
The ink could only be removed from the paper by scratching off the layer of paper containing the ink, which made it suitable for writing Torah scrolls (the handwritten version of the Torah, the Jewish holy book). “If users find a letter to be cracked, common with text of a vellum document rolled and rerolled daily, a calligrapher must remove the letter in its entirety before it is redrawn, for the scroll to remain ritually pure.”
I think about Woolf’s letters, and other family documents, postcards, recipes, scribbled notes. The words are faded but intact. I wonder how we will pass down our digitised, typed words, or if these will be lost and forgotten, a whole wordless generation. Tim Ingold writes of the loss of understanding of writing as a scribal practice; that we “fail to recognize the extent to which the very art of writing, at least until it was ousted by typography, lay in the drawing of lines”.
In the Dada exhibition at the National Gallery, I notice a piece of work by Willem Boshoff titled “Bangboek”. It is a series of tiny hieroglyphs and it reminds me of a religious text. Later I look up the piece and read that the translation of the title is ‘the book that is afraid’. Boshoff wrote it as a secret, silent protest to enforced military conscription during the apartheid era.
I wonder if it is the action of writing by hand that carries an intent, a strength of conviction that invests the words with meaning. Perhaps this is why our ancestors collected postcards, letters and written ephemera so preciously, not just for the words but for the action contained within the words, the physical gesture of scripting. I stop reading words; instead I trace the shapes of the letters, imagine the motion of the writer, and try to deduce the sensations they felt, try to get under their skin.
Katy Beinart
Tim Ingold, Lines, 2007, Routledge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_gall_ink
