Jubilation

By Tim Wynne-Jones

I have lately fixated on a band out of Austin called Balmorhea. There’s a sweet little video of their song “Jubi” that I found myself watching with a curious mixture of delight and shades of parental concern that surprised me and made me wonder.

A boy sits punching his finger at a tablet, playing some frenetic video game and then, after only a few seconds, his mother takes it away. There’s no fuss; it’s just gone. He turns, looks over the back of the couch and – Voila! – there’s an outside! Which is when the music starts.
Soon he is through the gate and heading into the great Out There, where he startles a deer, watches an eagle soar, stumbles upon a ruin, complete with the jawbone of a cow, an abandoned and desiccated wasp’s nest and a rope to swing on.
He runs with the cattle beasts, then veers off into the wood — deeper, ever deeper, further and further from home. He crosses a chasm on a suspension bridge and eventually finds the ultimate escape: an untethered boat.
He takes off from shore with only a paddle out onto the wide open reaches of a lake or quarry, on and on, to a stream and shallows and finally a sandy spit where Balmorhea are playing the song that has accompanied his adventure.
It’s dusk, now; there’s a fire. The boy skips around the fire — around the band — and then, as night gathers, he makes his way back – his journey speeded up until he is home, at last. He walks in on his family, sitting at the table. Dinner is waiting. One is tempted to add, “And it was still hot.”
It’s a lovely idyll. What you hope for a kid: the realization of all that there is beyond the screen door — what there is beyond those other screens that pervade contemporary life, stealing away the very notion of vistas and mystery and pathways that are not merely the virtual manifestations of optimal, randomized algorithms. A world of piney-tree pathways. The boy goes out into Life, having been expelled (or rescued, depending on how you look at it) from the simulation of life that pervades the halfway world in which we live so much of our day.
The kid in me smiled with glee; the parent in me was immediately on high alert. Where is this going? Will he find his way home? He has no life jacket. He has no cell. Shouldn’t somebody call someone? Are there strangers out there…
You know the routine. Gack!
The song itself is so lovely you cannot really expect that anything bad is going to happen. And I know, from my own free-wheeling childhood, just how resourceful you learn to be when no one is watching out for you, dogging your every footstep. God, how I would have rebelled at play-dates! And yet, society has scared so many of us into this electronic cul de sac, where we load our kids down with the jiggery-pokery of the screen-age. Where do the greater dangers lurk?
The irony of what I’m saying will not be lost on any reader of this blog. I too spend most of my days in the traces of my MacBook, with no kind mother to come and turn it off.
But just now – well, an hour ago – I got on my snowshoes and went out into the woods behind my home and, with some good, healthy trepidation, struck off the beaten trail, out into the bush. Then I worked at finding my way home through land with no paths but those of deer and coyote. The sun, already westering, cast good strong shadows and it wasn’t hard to remember to keep it on my right, knowing that at this time of year and around this time of day, it would set at the end of my road. There was no band to greet me out there – their fingers would have grown numb in the cold. But the memory of Balmorhea’s jaunty tune thrummed in my head. I don’t know where the title comes from. I can only think it must have something to do with jubilation.

(Hand)Writing

Remember childhood lessons on cursive writing?  Remember learning to create the big loopy tail for the lowercase “y” and where, exactly, to dot the “i” and “j”?  Are you a writer who drafts or revises by hand?  Or do you go straight to the keyboard?

Process is fascinating!  What goes on in the brain and body when we write by hand versus on the keyboard?  Do we access ideas/memories/sensations differently?  An article in the New York Times in June 2014 took a look at research into the writing of kids and adults. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html?_r=0  One study found that when kids “composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas.”

One researcher reflected on the connection between mind and the movement involved in shaping letters:   “With handwriting, the very act of putting it down forces you to focus on what’s important.”

There’s a certain liveliness to handwriting, too, a spirit that inhabits the letter shapes.  It bristles or floats or wavers or spikes–often a reflection of the writer’s personality or mood.  One of my husband’s great joys is calligraphy.  He often creates whole pages of specific letters or words, delighting in the swivel of the “Z,” the plumpness of the “Q,” the cradle of white space in the “V.”

In the past few years, I’ve been saving a few Christmas cards with handwritten notes from older family members and friends.  In this age of the constant, static selfie, these notes seem not fixed but infused with breath, flowing across the page.  A form of embodiment, perhaps.

How about you?  Before you toss the holiday cards, might you look closely at and appreciate the idiosyncratic handwritten notes and signatures? What do you notice?  Might you try handwriting a few paragraphs of your new creative project?   And as you do so, you might slow down and take pleasure in shaping the letters, letting them build into sounds in your inner ear and sentences that sway or sweep across the page.