“A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! And to be able to to live for ever you don’t need to have extraordinary gifts or be able to do miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Prospero? But they will live for ever because - living seeds - they had the luck to find a fruitful soil, an imagination which knew how to grow them and feed them, so that they will live for ever.” (Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921)
Today Ella wanted to start the lesson with her writing down all the words she knows. She wrote ‘Ella’ and ‘cat’. Then she asked how to spell my name, ‘Nita’. Then I suggested she pick another of the words we’ve been working on. She picked ‘pat’ then ‘tap’. Next she wanted to write ‘papa’ and asked how it was spelled – that was hard to explain because the ‘a’ in ‘papa’ is not like the ‘a’ in ‘cat’. She ended with ‘rat’. She drew the ‘R’ so that “the tail curls up and touches its nose”. She ended with a drawing of a cat. This process took 30 minutes in itself. 7 words. It was exciting that she was proactive in choosing an activity but it is very difficult for her to write letters, words and numbers. She must first think of the right letter. Then she slowly and painstakingly pushes the pencil in a shape that approximates the letter. She prefers capitals over lowercase. Her letters are big. She likes to add curly cues and flourishes to give the letters meaning she can hang onto, I think.
The interesting thing is that she loves to draw pictures and is amazingly inventive in designing and producing objects. Yesterday she made a “Felicity (a historical character from colonial Virginia) hat” out of paper with drawn flowers, bright color choices and ingenious chin strap – all by herself with no intervention. But write words? She’d rather eat onions.
Who needs to write anyway? I’ve never seen a word my grandfather wrote. I’m not sure he ever did. He managed to immigrate to the US from Sicily and carve out a life and a family during the depression and a few recessions. Pa in The Little House on the Prairie series doesn’t know how to write (we read the Little House books every bedtime) and he managed to survive the harshest of pioneer life rather well. I’m sure Ella would have even better examples of why she doesn’t need to learn how to write.
If she lived in Sicily year round she would be in good company. Education here is abysmal. 40% of Sicilians leave high school before graduation. Literacy is shockingly low and the results are felt in politics. The leaders that are voted in based on popularity and back door deals scandalize the region with the blessings of the populace. Bookstores are hard to find and the graffiti is often misspelled.
Yet writing is one of those miracles of the human mind that gives us love letters, signatures, grocery lists, and Luigi Pirandello’s novels. Pirandello was born just a few miles from where I write. Ella can do it. She needs more practice and her own laptop as soon as possible.
Distractions/Tangents:
- Pirandello’s biography on Italian Wikipedia
- PBS special - Misunderstoodminds
- A compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today.
- Education in Sicily by Maria Luisa Romano
