Writing Words

I’ve been working on a display for the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project which kicks off next Monday with recollections about the Rodney King beatings and riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who were caught in an act of horrific brutality on a neighbor’s video. The display brings together many voices, too, remembering that time.

It would have been very easy to do all this on a page layout program (I use Adobe InDesign) but I’ve been writing them out, longhand. In different longhands, actually. It has made the process much more meaningful for me as I struggle to understand different points of view, to come to terms with my privilege as a white person. There’s a meditative element in doing calligraphy. I slow way down, something I’m generally not very good at. It opens many doors.

This task is miniscule compared to the calligraphic event of the century (actually, of the half-millennium): the St. John’s Bible, which is currently underway by a team of calligraphers and illuminators under the direction of Donald Jackson, the scribe royal. Jackson came up with a new hand for this 7-volume project, a kind of loose Carolingian-foundational with an Italic edge, excellent for doing long patches of text (which, obviously, the Bible is). His team of world-class calligraphers has been working at his scriptorium in Monmouth, just over the Welsh border, since 2000; they’ve completed volume three. I’ve been studying this hand a bit and while I can’t claim to have mastered it yet, it’s definitely working even in its very imperfect form.

Of particular interest to me is that a local natural history illustrator, Chris Tomlin, has included Minnesota flora and fauna in this version (St. John’s Benedictine Monastery is in Minnesota). This is a bible of place. I’m eager to see it—looks like a trip to Minnesota is in my future at some point.

Donald Jackson urges people to get out their pens and write passages of the bible out in longhand in order to come to a closer understanding of the beautiful words. Having spent a mere weekend doing this, although they’re different words, I’m starting to get it. Perhaps this is why writers of graffiti feel such power?