T began to practice calligraphy in elementary school this year, 2024. He is a third-grader now. 2024 is the year he had the homework of "the first writing" (書初め) for the new year's day.
He was more excited about choosing a case for calligraphy kit than the writing itself. The lack of patience in whatever that requires time naturally renders calligraphy a torture to him, I feel. He did not know how much I had looked forward to the day that we would sit side by side, write calligraphy together and chat like two normal human beings.
For several years in elementary school, I commuted to a calligraphy school in a home classroom near my maiden home. I can still recall the smell of ink, the green space outside the house, and the sensory experiences of writing in a square space hearing the sound of rain drops. I remember the classroom was always quiet. It is never like the noisy chats and complaints that T made next to me. In those years when I was practicing calligraphy, I participated in several competitions and was awarded some honors for my handwriting. The small wish to teach T some basic strokes so that he could at least hold his brush still enough to write was cruelly objected when the boy just wanted to finish his homework as quickly as possible to hang out with his friends. I did not push further, and I told him that he only needed to manage everything within the long stripe of paper.
I hadn't done any calligraphy for nearly three decades after my teenage years until last summer. At the time, my life was an entanglement of every family member's schedules. A desire to write neatly, to sculpture words, and to snatch a moment of silence in writing appeared in my mind. I purchased a simple calligraphy set inclusive of a simple brush and a deck of copy papers of a Buddhist scriptures. My plan was to write several lines everyday before I began to work. The plan stopped before it could become a habit due to the lack of time and the lack of persistence.
Bringing everything back to my control, focus and concentration are what I longed to have when I only had to look at the squares on the paper. Every standard stroke is a reassurance of discipline, law and rule. These were needed for the chaos in the emotional turmoil I had.
Perhaps I have an obvious wish to impose these disciplines on T as he has been too wild to my eyes.
Seeing his writing, however, I realized that I did not really want him to write the way I wrote. I always appreciate the way Japanese calligraphy appears. There is not a particular style to follow, it seems. Calligraphy is more like a drawing an image on paper here. T told me that he was embarrassed by how well I wrote, but what I saw is that how it is difficult to be free.
