GOING WITH THE FLOW - 6 May 2011
6th May 2011
Like most writers I am fussy about what I write with, and on – not to mention obsessed with where and when. How I write is a new discovery every day. I used to write – for about 20 years with a black and gold Parker fountain pen. Until I became an American Citizen, I held a deep, bordering on rigid, affinity for all things English, hence the Parker. The choice of black connoted seriousness, the gold trim proof that I had graduated from my food stamp days during which period I made do with a cheap calligraphy pen.
Shortly before we left for Provence I dropped the Parker on its naked head, bending the nib beyond repair. It was a wide nib, again a preference for 40 odd years of writing, its width leaving an assertive, borderline aggressive, mark on the page, which seemed to add weight to everything I wrote. Of course, there was a psychology behind this, but let’s not go there.
So 2 days before leaving New York I went off to the pen shop thinking to replace the nib, only to find out that’s no longer done on site – one must ship the pen to the Parker Hospital where recovery is not speedy. So I moved on. How about a new Parker complete with wide nib? Sorry, special order. What to do?
Perhaps 20 glass cases lay before me with hundreds of pens displayed like jewels and, like jewels the prices ranged from glass-bits to diamonds, plastic to platinum. Finally having stated my price ceiling I was directed to a nifty little Montblanc measuring perhaps 5” capped, 4” unsheathed, which is how I like to hold ‘em. Let’s not go there either.
The trouble was, it was red, not black. It also only came with a fine to medium nib. But when I wrote with it, it darted across the paper with a light and wicked speed that made me feel like I was wielding an epee.
I’ve always written longhand, always with a fountain pen. For me it is a connection from my mind, through my body, to the blank page that has a flow, like blood through the veins. The speed of longhand is appropriate to the self, with just enough adagio to allow the awareness of thoughts leaving the mind to develop – on good days – into realizations upon inking the page.
Joel read me an article a few days ago about schools deciding to drop the teaching of cursive writing. What a lament. The skill it takes to begin a word and not allow the pen to stop until the word is complete is a discipline, which like all others, deepens the effort and the result: words should flow from humans. Leave the printing to computers.
When I taught creative writing – a term I use only because it has mass appeal but which is, in fact, redundant – I insisted that my students handwrite their assignments before typing them into their computers. I’m a bit of a speed freak myself, but have come to understand with age the importance of slowing down, especially in this mad digital era that is leaving us all breathless and fearful that we’ll never catch up. Our virtual reality seems to be reducing itself to smaller and smaller screens and I want to say hey, look up once in a while. Look around, the world is vast and 3-dimensional.
Another important piece about writing, as opposed to printing or typing, is it leaves a trail: you scratch out as opposed to deleting. The importance of this is that later, when you type what you have written, you get to “re-see” where you were stuck and sometimes you see the original thought was actually the better one.
So, back to the pen shop. Lord knows what I wrote on the note pad provided by the salesperson but it wasn’t my name. And the more I wrote with this fleet instrument the more I came to know it was the one for me. The fact that it was French seemed to auger well, if one is to write about Provence. And the color? Maroon? Burgundy? Oh, of course, blood red, ink of my veins.
And so it is today that I put in a new cartridge and start a new journal: Flying the Coop: Book II.