# Script Obscured: Six When I think of script, I think of the hand that wrote it. Not the abstract system of signs, but the particular tremor, the pressure, the rhythm of a specific human being who held the pen. A man's handwriting is like his gait—utterly individual, impossible to counterfeit perfectly. And yet we spend our lives trying to do precisely that: to hide ourselves within the conventions of script, to make our writing impersonal, legible to strangers, acceptable to the world. In school, they taught us penmanship as though it were a moral discipline. The teacher would stand over our desks, ruler in hand, correcting the slant of our letters as though correcting the tilt of our souls. We were meant to suppress the idiosyncratic, the natural curve of our hand, and instead conform to an ideal—neat rows of identical letters marching across the page like soldiers. The more perfect our script became, the more we had erased ourselves from it. But consider the forged check, the love letter written in haste, the suicide note—in these moments of necessity or passion, the hand escapes its training. The letters sprawl, they tremble, they reveal what years of schooling tried to bury. A graphologist, they say, can read the secrets of the soul in these deviations. Whether or not that's true, there is something undeniably honest about a hand that has stopped pretending. I have kept letters from people long dead. I do not read them for the words alone—those fade, become clichéd or incomprehensible with time. I read them for the *presence* in them, the ghost of the hand that moved across the paper. Here is a pressure, deliberate and firm: a person making a decision. Here is a lightness, almost playful: a moment of joy. Here, a cramping of the script, words squeezed together: anxiety, urgency, the mind moving faster than the hand can follow. And now we are losing this. The computer keyboard produces no hand, no individual trace. It democratizes writing—which is to say, it erases the writer. Everyone's digital script is identical. We have achieved at last the dream the schoolteachers could only approximate: the complete disappearance of the self into the system. Perhaps this is progress. Perhaps authenticity is merely nostalgia for a time before we learned to hide ourselves properly. But I suspect something is lost when the hand no longer speaks. A certain kind of truth dies with it—not the truth of what is written, but the truth of *who* is writing, the irreplaceable singularity of a human being in the act of making a mark. We have obscured the script so thoroughly that soon we will forget there was ever a hand behind it at all.

76.
The year has turned and brought your death-day back to me—alas!
That I should still be here, breathing, after all these years—nothing but wonder!

77.
Beneath the star-laden sky
The grave of the last gaze opens wide.
I shall live in joy, die laughing still,
Having loved life with all my will.
Write poems for me at my grave,
If love will give me truth's behave,
Like the seafaring sailor's way
Who weeps for the sea, in sorrow's sway.

78.
At the moment of farewell, no tears came;
Lips remained sealed—sorrow ran deep, a living flame.
Only two days later the rain of mourning fell,
The clouds of anguish burst, and weeping swelled.

79.
We spoke of meeting, of union to come—
Then death forbade it all and struck us dumb.
On worthless straw, a house half-built,
Memory comes to dwell, heavy with guilt.

80.
I have lost you—therefore
I shall not forget you more.

81.
I laid my friend to rest in the grave and turned toward home;
Yet my friend still dwells here—my home has become the tomb.

82.
You have not taken your leave from memory—
You have come still nearer to my heart's recesses;
You have found your dwelling in God's house,
Your soul is present here, your presence never ceases.

83.
Where death dries up like a shallow stream,
Life forgets its emptiness and learns to dream.
Where the soul finds a home to call its own,
Life seeks fulfillment in what it has known.

84.
Forgive those who weep, whose eyes spill tears,
Those stricken with sorrow in the hour of final parting;
Forgive those who hold us back with false claims,
Who would block the path to the gods' dwelling.

85.
Can death show its terror to a soul
In whose heart God himself dwells as living consciousness whole?

86.
Then I was young, still a college boy;
Death's arrow pierced my breast without ploy.
My beloved friend, dry your tears—I did not depart before my time,
Fate had measured out this span, this was always meant to be mine.

87.
In the ocean's depths, in chambers dark,
How many jewels lie hidden from sight!
How many flowers of heaven, unknown by name,
Scatter their fragrance, fall unseen from light.

88.
A handful of forgotten dust shall fall upon the road
In life's last chapter—this, alas, is all the world can show;
And yet in this dust alone I have walked in pride,
This alone is the essence of all things far and wide!

89.
Save for one true friend, no one's eye shall weep
When you depart from this earthly realm.
Many will weep—for weeping is the law when one falls asleep—
But each tear has its cause, ordained by karma's helm.

90.
In life you ever walked ahead; I could never reach
The place where you had come to stand.
Death has granted me the lead at last, and with it peace—
The pain of living has been lifted from my hand.