¶ The porch was shaded, and overlooked a wide green field that sloped gently to the sound. We sat in creaky wicker chairs beside heat-beaded cups of sweet iced tea. The terms of the game were simple: I would write my name, and D would tell me who I was.
Handwrite, that is — or, more specifically, sign my name. Give my signature. A thing I rarely have the opportunity to use, and which (I realized with some dismay as I went about it) I had never really gotten around to practicing. But D had let slip that she could read one’s personalities in one’s script, and this seemed as good a way as any to while away the afternoon. Would she read mine?, I asked. The hope in my heart was the same silent yearning one sets before mail-order ancestry kits, Meyers Briggs tests, star charts and social media: that I might discover my true self by submitting it to the discernment of others.
Not to mention that the medium in question — text — excited my bookish sensibility. In truth, I had instantly, secretly, enthusiastically, surrendered myself to the game’s premise: that the true Peter already abided in the words that I wrote, expressed not by the contours of the language (over which I labored endlessly) but by the shape of the letters themselves. That all it took was a trained eye to find him.
Little surprise to learn D, of all people, had such skill. With her floral dresses, her languid and exquisite turns of phrase, those pointy, hard-soled flats she wore even to the beach, she seemed living proof of the power of gesture. She wore it about her shoulders like an invisible throw. It said, wordlessly: we are not only what we are, but how we show it.
D crossed her legs and clasped her hands and looked out at the water as I set to signing. Would my cheap BIC suffice?, I wondered. Better than risking an inky fuck-up with her fountain pen. I signed once, twice, examined the childish swoops before me — practice runs, I decided — and turned my notebook to a fresh page. I wished I had practiced my signature. No: I wished I had a different signature altogether. Suddenly, our postprandial play had all the gravity of a trial.
But wasn’t that the point? Nothing less than the question of self?
•••
My pen stood at the crossing of two lines of thought.
The first states that handwriting can reveal, under proper analysis, one’s personality. This is the central premise of graphology, a pseudoscientific discipline that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Graphology emphasizes the expressive unconscious — it states that, without our knowing, the inner self is shaping our i’s and o’s in its own image.
The second line of thinking is, in effect, the obverse of the first: that handwriting is a tool of self-fashioning. Anyone who has ever practiced their signature (or wished that they had done so) understands this intuitively. Indeed, this reasoning is the raison d’etre of a recent spate of boutique consultancies like Florida-based SignaturePro, whose website offers the services of a team of professional calligraphers “to help people reveal their individuality through a new signature” (base rate: $100). Like so much marketing copy, the word “reveal” is misleading here. What is really promised is a new “individuality” altogether: beneath thumbnails of happy customers’ faces and professions, before/after diptychs evidence the stunning transformations of childlike scrawls into smart, swashbuckling scripts. This is brand management in the age of the self-possessed professional; companies have logos, individuals have signatures. And while the language of “personal branding” may belong to the twenty-first century, SignaturePro’s central premise is an old one: that when we put pen to paper, we are, in effect, creating ourselves on the page.
So which is it: do I form my script, or does my script form me? Is handwriting a tool of revelation or of creation? If both, where do we draw the line?
But I am making a muddle of all these lines: lines of thought, dotted lines, borderlines. And isn’t one’s handwriting a sort of line (albeit curvy and broken up) — and one’s signature, too?
As William James put it:
One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are “me” and “not me” respectively, it will at once be seen what I mean.
Anyone who can tie their shoes knows better than to tug too intently at a tangle. I don’t want to get knotted up. So let me follow this thread instead, and see where it leaves me.
•••
These two ways of thinking about handwriting — as self-fashioning, as self-revealing — are, in the end, two poles of the same idea. To fashion is to reveal the image toward which one is fashioning; to reveal the thing is to bring it into being. Whichever side dominates at a given moment is, therefore, a sort of litmus test for prevailing attitudes about the social function of writing. The Western history of scripts zigs and zags across this question — a centuries-long pas de deux between written language and the self.
Once upon a time, handwriting had little relation to the individual. Through the fifteenth century, handwriting in the western world was exclusive to court scribes and the monks of the scriptorium. Strict conventions allowed little room for individual expression. The reigning style — from the square Roman of Trajan’s column to the economical Rustica to the early Christian uncial to Charlemagne’s carolingian to inky gothic to the Italian humanist script endorsed (and tacitly enforced) by Cosimo de’ Medici — reigned politically, and cosmologically, too. This was writing in service of power.
With the printing press, as literacy exploded and scripts proliferated, handwriting ceased to represent participation in a monolithic enterprise. “By the eighteenth century,” Anne Trubek writes of the United States, scripts “no longer represented one’s devotion to God or one’s proximity to the pope. Instead, they showed one’s wealth, profession, and breeding.” It was a tool of upward mobility, with different trades (merchant, lawyer, teller) hewing each to their own script. Handwriting became the domain of the individual, bright-eyed with worldly ambition.
Spiritual ambition, too. In the early eighteenth century, the charismatic and penmanship-obsessed Platt Roberts Spencer set out from Ohio to convince the country that handwriting could do even more than change your occupational prospects: as an exercise in virtue, it could change your very character. Through his lectures and instructional pamphlets, Spencer wooed Transcendentalist sensibilities with the idea that, by modeling one’s script on the forms of the natural world (ripples, grasses, sunbeams), one could come nearer to the sublime beauty of God. This was writing as self-ennoblement.
Science was not long to follow. Around 1860, the reformist priest Abbé Jean-Hippolyte Michon abandoned a life of hard-fought ecclesial advocacy to preach a new gospel: the science of graphology. “All handwriting, like all language, is the immediate manifestation of the intimate, intellectual, and moral being,” he wrote. Handwriting, he asserted, emerged immediately, that is, sans mediation: straight from the unconscious. Through analysis, it revealed the self. (Little surprise that graphology took off in Germany in the 1890’s, around the time that Freud was establishing his theories and methods of psychoanalysis.)
Michon’s handwriting analysis boomed across Europe and the U.S. in the early twentieth century. It even spun off the idea that the causal relationship between personality and script was reversible, which produced a new wing of therapeutics known as graphotherapy. By changing your handwriting, the fresh industry insisted, you could change your personality: writing as psychic self-help.
Graphology still has its practitioners: the FBI employs graphologists, as do many professional headhunters. But research has refuted any meaningful relationship between personality and handwriting, and mainstream science has removed it from the club. Graphology is now a pseudoscience, stooped in the back room beside phrenology and palmistry. In a certain sense, you might say, it isn’t real.
Yet there I sat, on a shaded porch beside the sea, offering my signature to D’s ocular sensibilities. I knew that what she was doing wasn’t strictly scientific, but that’s not to say I didn’t believe in it. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that I wanted to believe in it.
Why? For the fun, I suppose. For the relief of letting someone else decide who I was for a change. For reasons, also, to do with writing, with the outsized role that it plays in my life, with my uneasy sense that the words I place on paper are closer to reality than the person who put them there.
For the comfort, however contingent and short-lived, of writing my name and pointing to the page and saying, Look, there — that is me.
•••
The clouds were humid smudges and the sky was pale blue — the same blue as the faint midline of the composition notebook where I first learned to put words on paper.
Clayton, Missouri. Glenridge Elementary. Ms. Krahman’s first grade class, where we would sit at low round tables and practice tracing our lowercase p’s and q’s and c’s and d’s. Like this:
…p (and) p (and) p (and) p (and) p (and) p (and) p (and) p (and) p…
until at some point, at the end of a line or the page, we would switch to q (and) q (and) q and so on. This repetition was meant to coax our curves into friendly ovals, like the ones Mrs. Krahman would draw with a squeaky green marker upon the board. But my hand was cramped and Mikey’s was jagged, and Mitch’s leaned suspiciously, and it was only Emily and Leah who achieved the desired roundness of form.
I wonder if we sensed, back then, the importance of the exercise. Were we aware that we were, with each line, creating ourselves on the page?
I think we did. Why else would I remember Mikey’s script; Mikey, with whom I have not spoken in over ten years? Andrew’s too: those tight, anxious, vaguely hieroglyphic letters, impossibly small. Or Becca, whose broad, charismatic vowels remain inseparable in my mind from the cartoon portraits of her short-haired boxer, Albert, that she would draw in the margin of her notebook.
I recall all this with striking ease: almost twenty years on, the forms of my classmates’ hands remain tightly linked to the broader strokes of each personality. But which way does the memory move? Is my sense of their character a mnemonic for the shape of their script? Or is it the other way round?
Whichever is the case, we saw ourselves on the page. Those with neat, elegant scripts (almost exclusively the girls) took pride in their refinement, while those with sloppy hands felt already set back in the long process of becoming that stretched, mysteriously, before us. And while I have followed almost none of these people into their adult life, I would wager that traces of this self-regard persist. Even if he rarely picks up a pen, I still think of Hayden as somehow identical to sentences that resemble a line of half-crushed soda cans — and I suspect that, on some level, he does too.
The funny thing is, I can’t remember anybody’s actual prose. The meaning that it matrixed was not yet perfectly legible to me. Which is to say there was a brief time, at the dawn of my relationship to the written word, where the expressive nature of writing resided in its quality as a picture (or, on the nights that my dad would read me stories as I fell asleep, in its quality as a song).
•••
There is consolation to be found here, in the thought that every text is also an image. It is the promise that everything is always, already another thing. This doubled vision has the power to detect (or devise?) new possibilities in a world overshadowed by the determinacy of seemingly fixed functions: a book is also a doorstop, or kindling. A smartphone is a darkened mirror, or a stone for skipping. A car is a bed, or a deadly weapon. A person is…
Well, that’s trickier. Does the same logic apply to human beings? Am I also, always, already another person? Where exactly do I draw the bounds of myself? And, to extend the metaphor: When I trace that boundary, which part of the resulting diagram is me? Am I what’s inside the line? Am I the line? Or am I, somehow, the vast cosmos outside of it? Jeff Dolven writes, “Any dividing line you draw, anywhere, you also draw around yourself.”
That a line divides is clear enough. It’s which side I’m on that gets confusing.
•••
Most of our sun-drunk lunch company had cleared out for a nap, but I remained on the porch, practically shivering with excitement. To my private sensibility, D’s and my seaside exercise thrummed with a doomed, anachronistic heroism. In giving so much attention to handwriting, I felt us to be pushing back, however gently, against the tides of history.
For writing has changed (as it always does): where on paper it was painting, on the keyboard it’s percussion. Once, it was our downstrokes and flourishes that gave us away; now it’s our upbeats and pauses, the relative tempos of each vowel and consonant. But something else has changed, too: unlike handwritten script, whose curves and angles are visible to the human eye, this rhythmic fingerprint is a mark of selfhood that can only be discerned statistically. (This feat is achieved by the same mechanisms, as it happens, that drive the large language models which now promise to save us the bother of writing in the first place.)
And who needs a signature? The last time I signed my name was with a sticky plastic stylus on the checkout screen at the grocery store. Even if I wanted to render my cutely circled i’s and swooping S, the battered touchscreen wouldn’t pick it up. Plus nobody cares. Like those enthusiasts with their tricorn hats and muskets, I’m merely reenacting a signature for the amusement of, I don’t know, my credit card company. So I make a lazy scribble instead.
Which brings us to the central question of every essay like this one: is handwriting a thing of the past? Am I eulogizing right now? Probably, if I had to guess. But I’m not sure. And what draws my attention in any case is not the disappearance of handwriting but the stubborn persistence of that mystery toward which it seems always to lead: the nature of the self, and the curiously sociable lines with which we try to define it.
Because, despite their promise of isolation, of perfect Apollonian clarity, these lines always seem to require the presence of others. What use, after all, is my script if there’s no one around to read it? What use is writing at all? And why bother about the “borders” of myself if not to know where I stand in relation to the selves that surround me?
Which returns me to D, sitting patiently all the while and peering through the glint of her pince-nez lenses toward the ferry on the sound. I could not say what she was thinking. In fact, it may be said that I had asked her to analyze my handwriting not to learn about myself but to learn about her.
I had met D only a few days ago, in the backseat of a mutual friend’s Subaru as we drove up the coast for a week-long artists residency. I had few hard facts, but I knew this much: she had gone to college in the Hudson Valley, had lived in the city as an unpaid intern at a reviled literary magazine, that she used a flip phone, and that she had spent the happiest months of her life alone and off-grid in a stone cottage on the outskirts of a village in Greece. She did not speak with her dearest friends for the entirety of that stay. She did not speak Greek.
On our sunny afternoon, she was waiting to hear back from the French consulate on the status of her student visa, which was the last hurdle between her and two years of graduate study in Paris. The window was rapidly closing, and it was not certain that the French bureaucrats would approve her in time.
Our week by the sea came to a close. I heard nothing from D after that. It was only months later, when a friend of mine returned from abroad, that I had the relief of learning that she had made it to Paris. He had seen her with his own two eyes — just about the only way anyone can be sure of her whereabouts…
I forget, for the record, what personality traits D descried in my signature that day on the porch. And I suppose this is just as well. For I was more curious about her than I was about myself. I still am. Which is to say that D remains, in many respects, a mystery to me.
But, hey, everyone’s a mystery if you sit with them long enough. And the very idea of a mystery implies its solution — a thing and its opposite. To know another person, the reasoning goes, to toggle their value from a zero to a one, I must hurdle that line which divides me and not-me, and observe things from their camp. This is impossible, as we know. Self-defeating, too. For it presents the obligations of a shared world as the business of inspecting each other across a barbed wire fence.
And if this graphology business is good for anything, it is in directing our attention to the possibility that there might be, in every gesture and flourish, in every minute, the detectable fullness of a person.
What this produces is not quite knowledge, and it can be hard to put into words. But if I were to try, it might look something like this: the shaded porch, the wicker’s creak, the ice cubes melting in their cups. The line as it loops and skates across the page, D and I as we watch it in silence. The afternoon stretches placidly before us, so deep as to be bottomless, so we cast our lines into its depths. There they dangle, mostly forgotten.
•
write (to) me: rustmenagerie (at) gmail (dot) com