Monday, September 22, 2008

titles. sometimes they come to me, sometimes not.


so after writing and deleting three, I thought oh to hell with it. what's a title but a bit of a sentence stuck up there by itself. how important is it, really. and it occurs to me that the unnecessary nature of what I do makes it even less important what my posts are titled, and even if they're titled at all.

it's a good morning for deleting.

I was just reading (after posting a reply to the kind comments made on the last post) about handwriting, the benefits of it, the way the typewriter and computer have pushed it aside. a lost art, I suppose, or almost lost, like making homemade jam or any manner of things people used to do by hand and now can do by machine. can do so easily by machine that the process loses all its joy, all its purpose in the push to have a finished and easily digestible product.



I have bread baking at the moment, but it's a loaf of frozen dough bought from the grocery store, so it gives the illusion of being made by hand. I've made bread from scratch before (I keep meaning to look that expression up, every time I use it) but it didn't turn out so well, more doorstop than delicate. maybe this winter I'll try again.

the sky's lightening now, but very slowly, softly, like veils being drawn away. I don't expect we'll see the sun today, but the rain is making the moss sparkle, and I'm quite fond of moss. it's so unassuming and quiet, growing slowly and completely capable of bearing long periods of inattention. I'd carpet the house with it, if I could.


4 comments:

Pauline said...

well, you got me wondering, too, so here's what I learned. "It is the world of boxing that has given us the concept of 'starting from scratch'. The scratched line there specified the positions of boxers who faced each other at the beginning of a bout. This is also the source of 'up to scratch', i.e. meeting the required standard, as pugilists would have had to do when offering themselves for a match." This from the Phrase Finder.

Dragonflies confirm my belief in magic.

Roberta S said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Roberta S said...

I accidentally posted my comments before corrections were done so I deleted it and will now try again.

shara, there are a couple things you spoke of here that really appealed to me.

One - your love of moss. I love moss as well. What kind of delightful green is that that no other green things in nature can duplicate? And how lovely the way it spreads itself with such precision in height and depth? And how fascinating the way it can reveal its gentle softness without touch? And how determined it is. In the spring before grasses begin to green, in the woods there are scattered carpets of lucious moss.

The other thing was your comment on the lost art of handwriting. Honest to god, when I was a kid, teacher's compelled me to believe that handwriting came well ahead of knowledge. You could do well in any subject with a grand display of flawless handwriting. Leaves a bit of a hollowed-out feeling now to see how little it is recognized or valued.

The irony of all this is my neighbor who determined that her school children would not, and did not need computers eventually confessed to me that they were losing marks for handwritten assignments.

As life proceeds, new grooves of behavior are designed and appears that one must get into that newest groove even if the old one worked just fine.

shara said...

pauline, well now I'm puzzling over the image of boxers making bread. :) the phrase finder sounds like a fine resource, I'll have to go and check it out. I'm very curious about the origin and meanings of words and phrases, often I'll stop in the middle of conversation (spoken or written) to ponder.

roberta, moss is possibly one of the most beautiful and lush things in the world, I'm pleased to meet another moss-lover. it's a lovely morning, sunny and chirpy with birds, and I'm off to the shed to write and paint and reflect on various things. I've got several notebooks on the go and I write in them as the spirit moves me, so they're more like puzzles than stories; poems, questions, pictures, ideas, grocery lists, whatever comes into my head. and some of the entries are in my best handwriting; it pleases me to no end when I shape a letter nicely, or the look of a word seems to convey something other than just the word, like the written word becomes a picture all by itself.