It Is Written

I am learning to write again, this time with pencil and paper. Taking care with each letter, each word, each punctuation mark; the space between them; slower than how my mind usually works. But that’s the point. It has nothing to do what with what I am thinking, and everything to do with this writing.

 

The journey I am taking with this writing and the journey the person I have hired to type it will differ. Same with those who have read it in its published form. Some of us will never come together to talk about our experiences with this writing, and I can live with that. What I cannot live with is if we did come together how the conversation might strive towards consensus. This is not writing but democracy.

 

For some, the previous paragraph has inflected this writing, made it anti-democratic. But it is not anti-democratic, only not democratic. Nor is it a shoe or a Frisbee. It is not many things, and yet the longer I go on, the more likely I am to write about all that it is not, because that is what this writing is -- a way to bring things to mind, project them, have the reader flash on them. In addition to all the things it is not.

 

One of my favourite lines, ever, was said to me by an Artist & Repertoire Vice-President of a major record label. I cannot remember the context but on the topic of bad thoughts and how difficult it is to steer clear of them, he said: "Don't think of a purple pony." And that of course is what I flashed on -- a purple pony. Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter" brings something similar to mind when he writes about Michael Goldberg's painting Sardines, and his own suite of poems, "Oranges".

 

Since starting this writing my pencil is no longer the fine point it once was. You can see evidence of this in the way the writing has changed, the increasing thickness of the letters and the punctuation marks. I want to say you can see this but of course you cannot, because we are no longer in the medium with which this writing began.

 

Does this matter? Do you feel you are losing something by not having this writing as I first wrote it? Imagine then that I am in the lobby of a grand hotel built in the early-1900s, and kept that way. This was a time when someone writing in a notebook with a pencil

September 9, 2015