Pencils and Plowshares
The ideas we have, that never touch paper, or song, or wood or metal or glass, are gone. Lost, like a morning fog, or rain on a sandy beach, never to be heard or felt or understood by anyone, ever. And that seems more than a bit sad and needless, to me. And selfish. Because of all the things we do as human beings to be remembered, to matter, to influence, to help; the creations of our own hands are the things that can accomplish those most powerfully.
And they don’t have to be big or impressive, by the common definition. They can be mere letters. The handwritten kind, that I single out as but one example, because they’re a form of both correspondence and conveyance-of-meaning of which we are all capable, and one which is in grave danger of becoming a forgotten relic in today’s world of digitized communication. There is a precipice, I think, and we stand right now on the edge of it, without even realizing the depth of the void before us. Losing handwriting is to lose a part of art. It is to lose a piece of our humanity, by losing the passing-down of our heritage. Handwriting itself can be artistic; Every document penned by our Founding Fathers in flowing calligraphy could be framed, and appreciated only on the merits of the beautifully-formed slashes and swoops.
But that’s not what I mean. In fifty years, will you know how your dad felt as he was struggling to balance his obligation to earn a living, and his desire to spend time with you? Will you remember his words when he dropped you off at college? Will you still have the encouraging text from your mother when your first boyfriend broke up with you? When you lost the starting spot on the soccer team to the new kid that just transferred in from Pittsburgh?
Would we have had any sense of personal history, had even an inkling of the horrors of war, of the abject desolation of the Dust Bowl, of the loneliness and hunger of the Great Depression, if we did not have the written letters of those who experienced them firsthand? What if the Magna Carta, the Ninety-Two Theses of Martin Luther, the Federalist Papers and the Declaration of Independence, had all been established in email form? To be sure, they might still exist in the electronic ether, but would not something have been lost in the majesty and gravity of such documents, had they not been penned?
Absolutely, yes - and it’s the same thing we lose when we don’t put to physical form those qualities that are us. By far, the greatest hurdle we face in putting pen to paper, brush to canvas, or hand to key, is the feeling that we don’t have any artistic talent. That we don’t measure up to the picture the world holds out to us of an Artist. Maybe it’s so far removed from your life that you’re pretty sure you don’t even have that gene.
But that’s a paper enemy. An idea with no foundation in fact. Merriam Webster defines art this way: “Something that is created with imagination and skill, and that is beautiful, or that expresses important ideas and feelings”. So besides function, wasn’t it also art, when those who came before us created hand-hewn cabins and wooden wheels and flowered gardens and finned taillights? Do not birdhouses and patchwork quilts and hand-blown bottles express something far beyond the use for which they were intended?
Consider this: If you were to hold in your hands a handwritten letter from your great, great grandmother, it would be to you, unquestionably, a living, breathing, humanized document, complete with ink blots, oddly-shaped letters and imperfect punctuation. And it would be those very things, those technical imperfections, that tell as much of a story as the words themselves. They impart a sense of the writer’s personality, of her spirit, of her mood. They create an experience that is far closer to actually being in her presence than a typed, formal document could possibly produce.
And so it is with painting, and music and sculpture. With building doghouses and marking the growth of your kids on the doorframe. We need to touch the world to change it. There is something about that which is tangible. That which seeks not merely to include the errors and fallibility of the maker, but uses them to tell the story in an even deeper way. It’s why many still prefer the feel of holding and turning the pages of a paper book, even though digital books are much more efficient. It’s why people are still moved to paint - and moved by the paintings of others - when a computer-rendering of a photo can accomplish a similar aesthetic with much more accuracy and much less effort. It’s why hearing an artist play her music live, will never be replaced by the flawless facsimile of machine-generated notes. It’s why we still marvel at the great buildings of centuries past, and the asymmetric perfection of hand-carved stone.
Even in an age of photons and convenience, the fact that we are tactile beings is evident. Ironically, the real genius of Steve Jobs - the man from Cupertino who arguably placed the digital age into the hands of everyman - did not lie in his development of a more seamless operating system, or the nearly-complete vertical integration of his products from corporations to the front pockets of junior-high students. It was in his meticulous attention to form. The feel of the iPhone in hand - a result of the weight, the materials used in manufacture, the experience of submitting inputs - is what transformed mere technology into the always-in-hand instrument much of the developed world now feels it cannot live without.
But a rectangle of metal and plastic and glass - however all-knowing and progressive - will never truly place you in the desert Southwest like ‘Over the Cliff’, by Georgia O’Keeffe. It will never resonate in your thoughts like ‘Little Wing’ by Jimi Hendrix. It will never be your father’s workbench or your grandmother’s painted china plates, or your son’s initials burned into a cheap piece of elm in 7th-grade shop class. It can’t possibly be the ’57 Chevy your uncle restored, or the jewelry your wife creates under the dim evening light at your dining room table.
And it will never tell the story of you.