A Fountain Pen Adventure
Created | Updated Jun 3, 2012
See what can happen? First, there was a journal discussion. Then there was drawing. Finally, an Editor got excited. See what we get up to with our minds?
What I'm saying is, this is a collaborative venture. It's not all CC's fault.
A Fountain Pen Adventure
A fountain pen. What's it doing in cyberspace?
What's that you say? We're post-literate? Post-manual? Post-everything?
Bah!
If these kept silent, would not the very stones cry out?
Exactly. The pen is drawing. Draw, pen, draw.
Fountain pens. We think of musty counting-houses, ancient schoolrooms, labour with the fingers. Poor Bob Cratchit.
Your Editor had fat pencils and biros, though nothing helped. 'Dmitri has very poor penmanship.' Bah. It was a pencil. Dmitri had very poor pencilmanship. Dmitri's dad said, 'I am an engineer. I print. Do the same, then everyone can read it.' So he did, until the computer came along. Now he types types types.
Poor Prof Animal Chaos, with his nib and his ink and his blotting paper.
The fountain pen, like the Prof, would rather be somewhere else than an ancient schoolroom. So the fountain pen, in a creative act, draws itself a flower friend.
Round, like a circle. The eternal return. The perfect O.
The fountain pen discovers the circle. It makes geometry.
The Divine: a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.
The fountain pen grows philosophical.
Even fountain pens sing the blues, we suspect.
Or the blacks, or the reds.
Depends on the ink, one supposes. Loneliness is a one-way street, maybe in Exeter, maybe in Pittsburgh. Fountain pens should not be lonely.
'Let's get together.'
'Good idea. What shall we do?'
'Let's make something.'
'Why not?'
Pens leave an indelible impression.
Numbers.
There are numbers?
The fountain pen climbs the hill of numbers. Its point ticks off the count: 1, 2, 3, 4. . .
Numbers to mark days, years. Space-time. Numbers to count the eggs in the fridge. Numbers to say, 'Pay the delivery man.'
The pen is master of numbers. It continues on its path to conquest – knowledge, here I come.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
