Beyond Beautiful Writing/

Calligraphy is often described as “beautiful writing”: A recognized, practiced pace; a visual legacy; a studied proportion & patterned coherence; a visual harmony of elements— ligature, join, & empty space. In practice, calligraphy is anything but. Ink reveals every hesitation— each arrogance, covering, or turning away registers on the page. Calligraphy is vulnerable & bold: It’s trembling & showing up to one’s shortcomings; it is incremental shifts in habits of hand & life. Each calligraphic stroke is a visual-historical map of intersecting languages, sacred traditions, & cultural legacies—oppression, beauty, resistance, prayer. Each stroke begins before language gets born—unseen place where moving gesture touches page & words, like legacies, are renewed. Or re-written.

Calligraphy is where meaning & form converge in a dancer’s sensibility: It’s where beauty & beautiful behavior meet. Calligraphy is a physical-visual, substantial trace of a body’s architecture turned on the axis of a tool within natural limitations. Reeds are pulled from marshes between Iran & Iraq; feather quills culled from flight; brushes of goat & horse hair; carved balsa wrapped in cotton or gauze; ink distilled from mountain pine or soot from mosque lanterns, perfumed earth, sweet rain; trace elements of accumulated blessings & ancestral whispers. Calligraphy moves at the pace of a body aligned with nature. The quality of one’s writing is effected by various papers— slick ahar, porous mulberry, toothed mould. It’s also effected by where one writes: temperature, humidity, available materials, qualities of air & light, socio-political ruptures, the presence or absence of resources, teachers & community. The quality of one’s hand is shaped by particular “states” or moods & by the more durative, collected energies of dedication & practice—the way it works on you as much as you work on it; the way everything you do has a way of showing up, each moment, in how you are. Calligraphy is a hand, turning in the dark on the heart’s axis, accumulating heat while the printing press sleeps on.

A Stillness That Doesn’t Whisper/

Calligraphic forms are “love letters” in the broadest sense. They are rooted in sacred traditions & lineages of devotion. Some calligraphic traditions have been likened to meditative practices & martial arts. There is is discipline & flow here, but it’s the kind of stillness that doesn’t whisper. Calligraphic scripts are also palimpsests of historical-political legacies—they’re often used to confer legitimacy, consolidate power & ossify sacred texts; to obscure regional varieties in meaning, exchange, & trace elements of orality. Calligraphy is sign, signifier, talisman, & authoritative warning. It’s the strange meeting place between China’s big character propaganda posters & Coca Cola’s logo campaign that subtly appropriated not just the “Spencerian” script (how handwriting was taught at the time) but all things Americana— from Santa Claus to the flag. While scripted nationalism can be used to sell soda, art is also used to sell imperial projects. American Abstract Expressionism emerged during the Cold War. In it can be found trace evidence of exchanges between US artists & Chinese calligraphers in particular as they reached for alternate systems of meaning, composition & versions of self & the sacred. At the same time the CIA was quietly sponsoring prominent exhibitions—promoting “Individual Expression” as the positioning statement of the “free world” versus communism— strategically re-centering geopolitical power, & Western art world. from Paris to NYC. What more interesting conversations did this obscure— about how to be on this planet with each other, of a self in relation, & perhaps of the nature of abstraction itself?

While used in projects of nationalism & conquest, calligraphy also preserves a wider human inheritance & resistance to devastating geopolitical projects of power & control. Take for example Chinese Calligrapher Wang Dongling & multidisciplinary Egyptian artist, Behia Shehab. Dongling is one of China’s most prominent living calligraphers— he’s practiced, traditionally trained if not masterful. But it’s his “Chaos Script” (luan shu) that he describes as “the achievement of a lifetime.” Dongling finished his early art education at the start of the Cultural Revolution. He found early employment (& perhaps survival) writing Big Character posters for the Red Guards— the essence of enforced, insistent legibility. For critic Gao Shiming, Dongling’s disciplined spontaneity “liberates the act of writing from conveying meaning”. He goes on to say that “detached from all the traditional ways in which calligraphy refers to objects or concepts and graspable images of things” with Dongling, “writing becomes pure trace.”

Trace of what?

What if it’s meaning that’s liberated, that presses her beating heart against the bars of recognized (habitual) forms & refuses the cage? What if it’s us? Just because something is recognizable & habitual doesn’t make it true or real or natural. This is as true for works of art & communication as it is for social systems & world views. What if luan shu is an invitation “to fall apart together”, as Báyò Akómoláfé writes, to open space & “get lost”, as Rebecca Solnit writes— (“lost” from the Old Norse Los: “To disband an army”)? In a world that’s increasingly self-destroying, unfree, & fractured— harmony or legibility might look conversely a lot like chaos. Luan shu might not be legible in the usual sense, but it’s beautifully articulate.

In her 1982 Harvard address, Audre Lorde reflected, “if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive”. Insistent, enforced kinds of legibility— ways we recognize each other & often don’t—are increasingly compressed, often violent: With a deadly clarity they cease to be communication at all. If luan shu offers a crack in those coded fantasies of recognition, Behia Shehab’s A Thousand Times No is a declarative refusal. In 2010, Shehab was invited by the Khatt Foundation to participate in a project celebrating 100 years of the Arabic Script in Europe. Shehab is artist, historian, & activist— she researched myriad ways “No” (Lam-Alif) is stylized in Arabic. Her research merged with the energies of revolution during the Arab Spring. Like Dongling, Shehab’s work presses its beating heart against the bars, trading museum walls (quiet as it’s kept), for rewriting a world on city streets all over the world. The first wall she wrote on was in Vancouver— a line from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: Stand at the corner of a dream and fight. In an interview after her work made history with a UNESCO prize, she describes how a can of spray paint gave one with a quiet voice a way to scream. Her forward to the 2015 publication of her work A Thousand Times No: A Visual History of the Lam-Alif, sums it best:

When you want to deny all of the stereotypes that are imposed on you and that try to define your role in world. When you want to reject almost every aspect of your reality. When you want to decline every political reality you live under. When you want to dismiss all of the options available to you. When you want to negate all the accusations that go hand in hand with your identity. When you want to refuse to be an imitator or follower of the West, yet you also refuse the regressive interpretation of your heritage. ‘A thousand Nos’ are not enough.

Cultivating Receptivity/

In the Ottoman Thuluth style I studied, self-expression & mastery are are far from the goal— the horizons are wide, held up by many hands. Study passes through generations from hand to hand as a way to serve the art itself & to honor one’s predecessors. There is no formal equivalent for this student-teacher relationship in the US. Calligraphy frustrates not just norms in Western methods of instruction, but also categories of art & perhaps the entire concept of what art is in the first place— it’s ontological, epistemological role in shaping the order of things & the faculties of perception with which that order is seen, reified, or rewritten. The focus of practice isn’t necessarily on what one seeks or, as Picasso emphasizes, on what one finds. While it does shake the dust off one’s soul, it might not even be what one becomes. It’s more like cultivating a particular state of receptivity, subtle noticing, & the ability to stay in it a little longer. In this sense, calligraphy is hospitality —or as a teacher of mine said better: Calligraphy is love. Practice here requires an alternate notion of self to most Western modalities altogether. The closest North American iterations don’t come from dominant culture, but are intrinsic to its fabric. I owe a debt to these voices long before any calligraphic pursuits. Here’s bell hooks from her book Talking Back:

Discarding the notion that the self exists in opposition to an other that must be destroyed…I evoke the way of knowing I had learned from unschooled southern black folks. We learned the self existed in relation, was dependent for its very being on the lives & experiences of everyone, the self not as signifier of one ‘I’ but the coming together of many ‘I’s. The self as embodying collective reality past & present, family & community. Social construction of the self in relation would mean… that we know the voices that speak in us & to us from the past, that we would be inn touch with… our ancient properties."

Much like Arabic letters in their isolated forms, a good part of practice seems solitary: A hand mercilessly repeats its own shortcomings, habitually blackening the page until something breaks down & one’s renderings begin to take on some shadow of the gestures & grace of preceding calligraphers. A beginner’s meshk (practice pages) reveal each arrogance & non-seeing, each moment witness slips into muddy pretense. New strokes are practiced between the spaces of old letters. They scatter across the table like letters from an old lover— intimate communications registering their lessons & losses. Progress here doesn’t follow a neat line from past marks into present iterations—it pulses & folds back in on itself & sometimes isn’t immediately visible at all. A hoca’s (teracher’s) red to a student’s karalama (“blackening” until the page is obscured) is correction, subtle alignment, but companionship also: They are first to see the forms, dusted after a week’s labor, in all their victories & failures; first to catch some disproportion in relationship or trace some small movement between it & a new place; first to remind there are some curves you have to take blind to accommodate fullness, trusting not forcing the natural limits of reed & wrist. Practice isn’t solitary at all—it’s wiser, longer, held up by many hands. To follow a teacher’s “hand”—a term used to describe calligraphic styles, hands, as well as the quality of the writing—he has a good hand)—is a kind of whole-bodied listening which rewrites more than just handwriting. It’s not just a thread of ink one traces, but generations of slow turning on the heart’s axis, & of seeing each other through.