TYPOS

 

7th line down middle column

I woke to a kindly private text from my brother pointing out a typo in my recent blogpost about some research trips I’d done for my dissertation: British Museum instead of British Library. Fortunately, blogs are easy to correct and I reminded myself it couldn’t be as disastrous as the email I once sent to Boys’ Brigade parents asking them to make sure their boys brought their wellies – at least, I meant to type wellies!

 I’ve been thinking about mistakes a lot recently.

In the British Library (and if you’ve never been, please do – it’s wonderful), in its aptly named Treasures Gallery, you can see the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus, our earliest surviving manuscript to contain the whole New Testament. It’s open at Luke’s story of the Annunciation where someone has crossed out ‘to a city in Judea’ to correct it with ‘of Galilee’.

You can also view a He Bible. Different versions of the 1611 King James Bible translate Ruth 3.15 as either ‘he’ (Boaz) or ‘she’ (Ruth) ‘went into the city’. Although the Museum of the Bible points out that this may not be a typesetting error but due to discrepancy in the text. Modern translations still differ.

And we probably all know about the 1631 Wicked Bible, with its compositors’ mistake of leaving out a key word to read “Thou shalt commit adultery”!

I also went to Winchester Cathedral, primarily to see the Winchester Bible in their Kings and Scribes exhibition. But I was struck by the story of diver William Walker, who, between 1906 and 1911, helped rescue the cathedral from collapse by installing over 25,800 bags of concrete. In the crypt now stands an Antony Gormley statue on top of that concrete but still in a pool of groundwater, sometimes rising high enough to fill the bowl the statue holds. Somehow, the flooding adds to the beauty and transforms it into a dynamic piece of art.

Which leads me onto kintsugi, a key concept in my dissertation, and how damage can be accepted and integrated, transformed into something more beautiful than the original flawless piece.

Or consider how children can get words or phrases wrong but these become memorable or endearing. Back to my brother again, I still struggle to think of the correct word when ‘scooper-upper-dumper’ works so much better for a mechanical digger. Or my eldest son who misheard a word to confuse it with a family friend’s name to create ‘crash bang Lawrence’!

I can’t help thinking how the errors in those manuscripts humanise them and make them even more precious. And then there’s how the Risen Christ still had His wounds. Our upside-down God turns something horrific into something wonderful. His wounds seem like a metaphorical version of kintsugi to me.

God doesn’t make mistakes, we’re told. But He does allow life sometimes to damage us. I wonder if we need to be kinder to ourselves – as people and as writers. Not to ignore our flaws but not to be afraid of being corrected, edited.  To allow God to kintsugi us and our work. To consider if what we perceive as mistakes may make us, our writing, more relatable or cracks ‘where the Light gets in’ for others to see.

Just like that email I wrote (or even the second one that repeated the same mistype!) has transformed from highly embarrassing to a great story.

Liz Manning lives in Cornwall and is doing a Creative Writing MA at Plymouth University, where she’s exploring fiction, poetry, and dramatic writing possibilities. She’s working her dissertation, a hybrid and visual poetry collection called “These Three Remain”, which explores how faith, hope and love sustained her through difficult times.

She blogs regularly at https://thestufflifeismadeofblog.wordpress.com/