FINDING THE FLOW

February 23, 2015

When I was 11 and starting the English equivalent of middle school, we were encouraged to write with fountain pens. I had a lovely little turquoise one, given to me by my brother which, in itself, made it the most special one in the class…until I heard the one across the room. It had a squeak, although squeak doesn’t do justice to the sound. It wasn’t the sound of a scratchy nib, but a chatty one. One that seemed to speak as it wrote. It had something to say and I wanted it.

After class, I traded mine for hers. Luckily for me she was fan of turquoise and somewhat embarrassed by her squeaky nib. I have no idea what happened to that pen. Certainly whatever it had to say could only be heard by me. Since then I’ve had many fountain pens. In my poverty years they were cheap ones made somewhat more impressive by the choice of a broad nib. For fifteen years I wrote with a medium-nibbed black Parker, until it fell on its head in 2011, the nib irretrievably bent out of shape.

For a moment this morning I thought I was irretrievably bent out of shape. My new pen arrived. I’d worried about its karma for nearly 2 weeks, ever since I ordered it through ebay, paying extra to have it express mailed. I followed the tracking info like a monkey at a feed drip, as if with every viewing I could speed up the delivery. Ha! It took 5 stops and 4 days just to make it from New York to Newark. When it finally cleared customs in Milan last Friday it disappeared…until this morning when I had to pay the courier $130 for customs duty because the vendor had incorrectly filled out of the necessary forms.

But hey, who cared. It was here. I threw down the mud-caked hoe I’d been wielding and ripped open the package. The pen was loose in its box, the cap separate from the body. And it was black.  Obviously I knew it would be black because they no longer make it in Bordeaux like the one stolen from me 2 weeks ago. The funny thing is, I nearly didn’t buy that one because I was still attached to the idea that a black pen is the real deal. But the truth is, that red pen wrote like that squeaky one; fast and smooth, ready to tell it like it is. And within a minute, back then, I realized that red was perfect as I’ve always thought that writing in ink is like spilling blood.

I looked at my new black pen and felt the kind of disappointment a new parent might feel upon the arrival of a son, instead of the desired daughter. I took the pen upstairs to my desk trying not to associate its jet blackness with malevolence and put it to paper. HORROR. Disbelief. Rage. The injustice! No speedy dart this one. It scratched its meanness across the page writing words of condemnation as it went: “scratchy, hostile, stiff, unyielding, unproductive.” And then as the sob tore out of me it wrote, “I want my pen back.” I bawled like a baby for half an hour.

Whoa. What had I been thinking? Of course I can’t have my pen back. And of course this one is not like the other one. A pen is an instrument. Just as there are no two Steinways alike, neither are there identical Montblancs.

Joel had violent dreams last night of driving back to the scene of the crime and running the bastards over. He awoke with a violent nosebleed. Now here he was, offering to drive me to Florence, the nearest city with a Montblanc shop, to get a new nib for the pen. But I was still in monkey mind. Back to the pen trying to get it to behave and each time is seemed to become meaner. And it pains me to admit this but I was back online looking for that pen of mine.

And then Joel’s nose started bleeding again and suddenly it was fuck the pen, just don’t take my man.

Those of you who follow this blog know by now that I write to discover the next question I need to ask and then to find the answer. Some questions are elusive, some are embarrassing, some are deceptively simple. But until one has the courage to ask the damn thing there is no chance of an answer. Not only that, but the answer may not be to one’s liking. And I have a feeling this is the case today.

My question is ”for someone who often writes of the folly of attachment why have I been unable to let go of the demand to have my pen back?" The answer is many layered I think but it has to do with feeling robbed on a deeper level. As though having the pen taken from me carried the same kind of trauma as having had my mother taken from me? Something to do with identity? The theft of the pen had a last-straw quality to it, and for a dangerous moment this morning I though it must be a sign that I should stop writing. Nobody wants me anyway. Ah, yes, the pity pot is always ready for another sitting.

Yet as I started down the worn rut of rejection I remembered a recent revelation: that in fact I don’t want to be in what has become the fickle world of publishing. I don’t want my work to be ‘read’ by agents and editors who don’t actually read but rather scan manuscripts for their potential marketing possibilities. Bottom-line feeders I call them.

I’ve never played well in the big pond. Never could go along with the game, the networking, the spiel. Never was a hippy or a feminist; liked the message but not the delivery. And I am so done with rejection.  I’m not the biggest, the youngest, the best, or the most. And I’m not for everyone. But there’s a big difference between hankering after commercial success and putting the work in a drawer. So I’m giving ‘publishing’ another month and if nothing shakes loose then I’ll self-publish. At which point, I’ll serialize the novel for all of you.

So, pack to the red pen. I wrote 4 years of posts with it, plus our book on Provence and the novel. Letting go of that pen felt like I was letting go of some kind of proof that I am the writer I have become. As if only with that pen could I synchronize my thoughts and energy into something not only worth writing but worth reading.  To buy into that illusion is to set myself up for self-induced loss of creativity. No way. If Joel’s nose could run that freely then so could this new pen. What in fact was there to lose?

I took Joel’s camera loup and examined the nib every which way. Nothing appeared mis-aligned. In fact it looked quite snug. Ah, I though, snug, eh? I’ll fix that. You can’t have too much comfort as a writer. I put my thumbnail between the two halves of the nib and separated them slightly. Turns out that 2 halves of a nib are like 2 halves of a couple…a bit of space allows for flow. I put the pen to paper and off it went like the sorcerer’s apprentice.

I hope my little red pen has found a loving hand and that it flows for that person as generously as it did for me. But I tell you this little black one has had quite the debut. And here’s the inexplicable, unanswerable question: was it the long thwarted journey it took to reach me, or the fact that I met it halfway that caused it to squeak as I speak.

NB. This morning our dear Gianni made me a new pen case.