The Tongue of the Mind

The good news, for those following along at home, is that over the four years I’ve been laboring over this newsletter, I’ve managed to create something like a habit. It’s a habit characterized by a regular cycle of desperation on Monday evenings, but it actually includes a fairly generous dollop of honest-to-God regular writing time each Saturday afternoon. This is a big deal for me, but it’s frankly insufficient to meet the goals I’ve set for myself. A normal person would probably say farewell and shut down their newsletter, but since Red Clay Bestiary and its regular demands are the impetus for this habit I speak of, I’m loathe to do that.

I do, however, have something else I’m working on that demands my attention and to which I donated my Saturday afternoon sprint. Lest y’all should have to go word-free, however, I decided to resurrect a piece I wrote on Medium about 18 months before birthing Red Clay. Medium is a nice-looking but generally shitty platform in which a number of my essays have been imprisoned like Napoleon on Elba. I wish to set them free. Apologies if you’ve read this one before, but I’m rather fond of it and would very much like to give it a second shot at fame and fortune.

I’ll be back with fresh words (or at least the same old words in a striking new order) in two weeks. In the mean time, enjoy:

A lot of people ask me about my pen. Actually, nobody does, but now you’ve started reading, you may as well ride it out. So, the pen. I should note that I’m a bit of a pen freak — I once wrote a loving ode to the Pilot Precise V5, which, in the interest of comity, I will not inflict upon you. But if you know the V5, surely you can agree, for a mass-produced disposable product, they make pretty good writing implements.

That was before I discovered the joy of fountain pens. My wife and I spent our twentieth anniversary in Montreal a couple years ago, where we discovered a charming little stationery store that featured a huge rack of pens of all different sorts. Individual V5s can be a bit hard to find, so I picked up a few.

As I was paying for my purchase, I noticed a small rack of Lamy fountain pens on the counter. I tried one out while the clerk enumerated its various features. I was besmitten. The next day my wife suggested I return to the store and select one as an anniversary gift, and I readily did so. I haven’t used another pen since.

The pen — my pen — is school bus yellow. I have become absurdly practical in my advancing years, and so deliberately chose the gaudiest pen available, lest it should vanish in the amongst the flotsam and jetsam of, say, our living room. It is a chunky tube of hard plastic — something akin to the acrylonitrile butadiene styrene used to make Legos. Other pens feel wispy and cheap to me now.

On the top is a heavy steel clip. Slide the clip over the cover of a notebook and rest assured, it is going nowhere. Halfway down the barrel are two elongated oval windows, on opposite sides, through which can be seen the contents of the ink cartridge. When the pen is empty, holding it up to the sky one can see a little murky light passing through, as though it were a rainy dawn inside the pen.

The cap comes off with a satisfying “snick.” Beneath, at the tip end of the barrel, are two flat depressions which give the writing end of the pen a triangular aspect, in order to orient the fingers properly and keep the nib parallel with the paper. (This particular model is aimed primarily at children, which, insofar as fountain pen writing is concerned, I am.) The nib itself is a band of curved steel tapering to a point, where there is affixed a tiny metal ball with a flat bottom. This is the writing tip. It is split by a hairline that runs up the band to a small hole where the ink pools preparatory to its transfer onto paper or unsuspecting friends.

This machine kills fascists.

In sum, it is a perfect, beautiful machine — a design honed by literally centuries of experience in a single function, and mastered by exactly the sort of fine German engineering one thinks of when one says “fine German engineering.” (Lamy produces its pens in Heidelberg, where it has done business since 1930.) It is amazing that anyone should expend so much effort on something so small, just so that I can get a little jolt of dopamine writing words on paper — itself an act that seems awfully small and even somewhat pointless in this era of word processors that can give you the instant satisfaction of seeing your possibly not-ready-for-prime-time writing strutting around in a top hat and tails. Why, indeed, should anyone bother with this kind of frittering around on the edges of human experience?

Well, small pleasures are important. Frankly, they’re probably more important than large pleasures, because they are cheap and common. Spread a thousand small experiences across your life and you get a solid emotional support, in much the way many thin wooden slats will support a mattress. One large iron bar, on the other hand — well even prisoners get better than that. Consider a thought experiment:

1) You get a raise at work. You go out, have a big dinner to celebrate, and the next day you go back to doing the same work you did before. Your next paycheck has a couple hundred extra in it, and that’s nice. In six months the effects of the raise have blended into the fabric of your life. You probably won’t get another one for another 18 months, or longer, depending on whether you file insurance reports or gut fish for a living.

2) Your mother gives you a pair of beautiful rosewood chopsticks with a dainty little carrying case, and you are inspired to dive into the whole idea of chopsticks with the gleeful abandon of a crazy person. You eat every meal with them, even cereal and soup and potato chips. That’s three times a day, plus snacks, that you’re interacting with these little wooden sticks, and every time you do you think of your mother and how fun it is to eat with chopsticks. In six months it’s second nature to you, but it will never be second nature to the strangers who walk up to you in restaurants and ask you about them.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “I don’t like strangers” and maybe you don’t care much for your mother either. That’s fine. You do you. Maybe you want to read a poem every night before bed or drink water out of a steel army canteen you purchased at a thrift store for 60 cents, pretending there’s a tremor in your hand like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. Whatever. It’s entirely up to you.

It’s a hard time to be a person in the world, and being a person is not such a cakewalk to begin with. Cultivating an odd habit or some little physical token, be it a pen or an article of clothing or a keychain guitar pick holder, can offer just the small margin of comfort you need to successfully thread the travails of daily life.

It’s almost a violation of my personal code to offer this sort of encouragement to the world at large; pessimism and wordy flailing at the many objects of my ire are more my style. But I don’t generally write even a sendup of the nastiest subhuman political creature without my pen, and it would be miserly of me to never share the enjoyment it brings me.

Snick!