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cremainsI dreamt I was a live-in caretaker for two very elderly ladies. They were dying and required palliative care. At some point they switched from merely dying in principle to being truly on the verge of death, and I would no longer touch them for fear of nudging them over the brink. One evening, one of them was sitting comatose on the couch. The standing one said to me, "Pick me up and put me in her arms." I drew my sleeves over my hands to somehow make it less like touching, lifted her, and sat her down right beside the other. I said, apologetically, "Well, this really isn't in her arms." She answered me, "When you're old enough, everywhere is your arms."
I'm learning to write on gawil/jawil (the whole skin of the animal), the preferred writing surface for a bunch of texts, as opposed to qalaf (parchment, much more paperlike). The products come out incredibly charming, but the process is balls. If you make a mistake, that's basically it as there's no truly satisfactory way to erase writing, unlike qalaf where with the aid of an electric fibreglass eraser, it can be as though the mistake was never there. Also, the ink bonds differently with the surface and going over a crooked line to fill it out can make it bumpy and sticky, rather like trying to touch up nailpolish 30 seconds after application. This is complicated by a surface which often has tiny depressions. So basically everything has to be good the first time around. It's also much harder to get any sort of nuance in the line.
With apologies for a dirty scanner bed, here's the first parshiyah of a mezuzah I'm writing on gawil. (I'd like to post it finished but I've got the flu today and don't want to fuck it up by trying to push through and finish just for the sake of a post.) While it has its issues, looking at it and holding the soft, heavy skin in my hand, I actually feel pretty content. It's not line-justified, as I learnt in a sugiya in Menahoth that they don't have to be justified, and I still haven't found a very compelling basis for stretching letters as they often are. The writing and the tagin are according to Ramba"m and the Darda'im (the gawil itself is from a Darda'i scribe who refuses to employ anyone who believes in the Zohar or other "superstitious nonsense"). Basically, all its details are intimately connected with sources I myself learnt and people/communities I myself know and love. I used to feel somewhat alienated and a weirdo, but looking at this I see how I'm caught up, surrounded, and preceded by people I care about.
Speaking of the Darda'im, on Parashath Naso I went to them for minhah only, because in the morning I was reading Torah for another congregation. There are usually no women at minhah. As I left, a bunch of the men came out and asked "Hey, where you this morning?" and told me where they were in learning hilhoth shehitah so next week I could come early and learn with them (which I did). I had no idea the people on the men's side even knew if I lived or died, they're so invisible to me, so that was touching.
I'm learning to write on gawil/jawil (the whole skin of the animal), the preferred writing surface for a bunch of texts, as opposed to qalaf (parchment, much more paperlike). The products come out incredibly charming, but the process is balls. If you make a mistake, that's basically it as there's no truly satisfactory way to erase writing, unlike qalaf where with the aid of an electric fibreglass eraser, it can be as though the mistake was never there. Also, the ink bonds differently with the surface and going over a crooked line to fill it out can make it bumpy and sticky, rather like trying to touch up nailpolish 30 seconds after application. This is complicated by a surface which often has tiny depressions. So basically everything has to be good the first time around. It's also much harder to get any sort of nuance in the line.
With apologies for a dirty scanner bed, here's the first parshiyah of a mezuzah I'm writing on gawil. (I'd like to post it finished but I've got the flu today and don't want to fuck it up by trying to push through and finish just for the sake of a post.) While it has its issues, looking at it and holding the soft, heavy skin in my hand, I actually feel pretty content. It's not line-justified, as I learnt in a sugiya in Menahoth that they don't have to be justified, and I still haven't found a very compelling basis for stretching letters as they often are. The writing and the tagin are according to Ramba"m and the Darda'im (the gawil itself is from a Darda'i scribe who refuses to employ anyone who believes in the Zohar or other "superstitious nonsense"). Basically, all its details are intimately connected with sources I myself learnt and people/communities I myself know and love. I used to feel somewhat alienated and a weirdo, but looking at this I see how I'm caught up, surrounded, and preceded by people I care about.
Speaking of the Darda'im, on Parashath Naso I went to them for minhah only, because in the morning I was reading Torah for another congregation. There are usually no women at minhah. As I left, a bunch of the men came out and asked "Hey, where you this morning?" and told me where they were in learning hilhoth shehitah so next week I could come early and learn with them (which I did). I had no idea the people on the men's side even knew if I lived or died, they're so invisible to me, so that was touching.
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Date: 2012-06-11 05:21 pm (UTC)