The Power of Letters

苦学寒夜。紅涙霑襟。除目後朝。蒼天在眼。

1.

A friend in Yokohama suggested I write him a letter, for old time’s sake, he said.

Old times, indeed!

When I was young, I loved letter writing and set aside a serious amount of time to compose letters to family and friends. Like my online jottings, my letters were filled with impressions about places where I was traveling and the books I was reading. Sometimes I even wrote about my emotions and dreams. But they were always written imagining the person to whom they were addressed. They were for particular people, their faces imagined as I wrote. I also kept diaries. And often seeds for my letters came from my journal while favorite bits of letters received were copied there as well.

Last week, the New Yorker published a stunning personal essay by David Owen that had me in tears. Called How to Live Forever, the essay was about the way his personal letters, diaries and even photo albums have, over a lifetime, allowed him to stretch time through the art of remembering things. And not just any things but his most personal memories —if saved— he says can become “a line of defense against meaninglessness.”

Owens writes of the way emails and digital pictures are often lost. Speaking for myself, I have no digital records other than my online work. And even those are only saved at the convenience of other people. I do not have old emails or many old photographs. And so, last week when my sister brought over a box she had saved in her garage the last twenty years—a box I have no memory entrusting to her—I was completely stunned to find a bound notebook of at least a hundred handwritten letters my sweet ex-husband had written me from Southern Africa.

How is it possible I had completely forgotten about them? In was 1999 and Tetsuya faxed them every few days from Lesotho, faxing them on an international phone line to a convenience store down the road where I was living in Madison Wisconsin. I was there in that cold place for grad school—and the family that ran the convenience store would call me and say, “A letter arrived!” They were as excited as I was. Unable to read Japanese, the father who was the person who usually called would sometimes tell me the letter had a drawing on it… or, it is longer today….It was one of the sweetest experiences of my life — and yet, I’d forgotten it!

2.

Tetsuya has the most beautiful handwriting. We took calligraphy lessons in Tokyo and he really does have a beautiful hand. I always loved it. Isn’t it incredible the way that a person’s heart can seem to be embodied in their handwriting?

There is a famous story from Chinese history about an emperor, who upon hearing that his dear friend is dying far to the south, knows he will never be able to reach his friend in time to say goodbye. Unable to stand losing his friend, he dispatches a servant on the fastest horse in the imperial stable to race to his friend’s bedside and request one last sample of his handwriting— it must be cursive, he says, for within his friend’s grass script the emperor knows he can find the spirit and character of the man he so cherishes.

3.

In real life, Murasaki Shikibu’s father Fujiwara no Tametoki was a scholar of Chinese literature of some renown. But his career got side-tracked and he was out of work for a long time. He was without position in the Taiga drama version for a full ten years, before finally getting assigned to take over the governorship of Awaji (present-day Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture), which was ranked a lowly place. Maybe not unlike the ambassadorships of today, there was a big difference in prestige between being posted to Awaji compared to a place like Echizen. In the Heian period these outlying “countries” were places in importance into four ranks, with Awaji being the lowest.

Unhappy with the situation after waiting for so long, Tametoki sent a poem to the emperor that was said to be of such beauty and elegance that the emperor felt inclined to re-assign Tametoki to a top ranking governorship in Echizen.

苦学寒夜。紅涙霑襟。除目後朝。蒼天在眼

Poor and enduring cold nights to study
Till tears were like blood dripping on to my collar
On the morning I was not selected
All I saw was blue skies

蒼天 this could be blue skies but could also mean the son of heaven (the emperor).

Not many people in Heian Japan could write a poem like this. For not only did it harken back to a scene from Chinese history but his calligraphy was drop-dead beautiful. It was said that the emperor upon reading this poem could not stop his own tears.

It was a nice touch in the Taiga drama that they had the young Murasaki composing and sending this letter to Michinaga on her father’s behalf. Immediately recognizing the hand of his beloved it is his love that moves the plot.

4.

There was an article in the Guardian not that long ago about handwriting. The author felt that an author’s voice really comes out in handwriting in a way impossible when typing on a computer. I am not sure that is true. I hope not since I do all my writing on my laptop. But as I get ready to head to Taos for my 10-week writer’s residency, I will be taking paper and pencils…. I have not written long hand in at least a decade.

Kids do not learn cursive handwriting in schools anymore either. It’s kind of sad.

Owens, in that essay in the New Yorker, thinks that it isn’t the transition from handwritten letters to email that is actually the biggest problem, as long as you can find away to archive things. He feels the biggest issue is texting. These are sent in half-sentences, usually a string of them. My son will not read my long texts. So I am learning to break them up into strings.

3 Quarks Daily Essays on Calligraphy:
It’s Hailing Calligraphy
Calligraphy in the Garden