Recently, I sent out a call on Instagram for suggestions on good pens for callused hands of deathly grip (mine!). Based on the many helpful suggestions received, I splurged on a dozen different pens and they appeared one by one like so many magic wands at my desk. And so, I sat one day, all day, to test them one by careful one for comfort, flow and ease. By evening, my calluses had a life of their own, my wrists hurt and I felt the force of each word as it appeared on the page in inky resplendence. I also experienced greater resonance between thought and action and felt, for once, that I had done an honest day’s work.
Many have waxed eloquent about the relationship between writers, the physical act of writing and writing instruments. Maria Popova at Brain Pickings has, as ever, curated a beautiful set of thoughts and examples of those attached to marks on paper as “our most human trails of thought”. From her, I heard about how the late neurologist and science writer Oliver Sacks wrote exclusively by hand, considering the act “an indispensable form of talking to [oneself]”. I also vowed to pick up John Steinbeck’s Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath for just this line, “Oh! Lord, how good this paper feels under this pen. I can sit here writing and the words slipping out like grapes out of their skins and I feel so good doing it.”
Auratic habits
The habits of famous writers feel almost auratic in some ways and show up regularly on my reading list. In one of my favorite books, A Moveable Feast , Hemingway writes, “The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed.” Susan Sontag wrote with a felt-tip pen. My brilliant mentor and friend, the academic, translator and author Martha Selby, writes every day on college-ruled yellow legal pads with Stabilo Point 88s. The anthropologists would call my efforts to track these habits my own bid at sympathetic magic. In other words, these are desperate measures to have the brilliance of other minds rub off on me via their habits and writing instruments of choice.
But for this magic to work, one also has to be caught up in the worlds of writers, and care about words. If one is instead of the kind to throw them around carelessly as abetted by our online worlds of much action and relentless speed, then we are all wont to perform not magic, but what the late anthropologist Neville Whitehead might call witchcraft. (Due apologies for the gendered implications of the word.) For the words that assault us and that we send out to assault others over social media feeds, chat windows and Instagram stories are unable to bear material witness to thought and thoughtfulness.
I think about such things as I read the tweets and messages of armies of celebrities, trolls and professional rabble-rousers (or shall we say anti-protestors?) sent into the aether seeking to magically cancel the bodily work of protest. Perhaps we would see less of such if they had to find a pen with the right thickness of nib tip, fill the cartridge with ink, write legibly, find suitable stamps and send missives out by post.
I get that many of you might find all of the above the ramblings of a nostalgic Luddite, but let me then also tell you that most of those that sent me suggestions of Baokes, Cellos, Pilots and Lamys were in the age bracket of 20-30. So ha!
As a closing thought I want to speak about the Chicana cultural, feminist and queer theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, who in the posthumously published work Light in the Dark speaks about writing as “a gesture of the body”, a deeply inhabited, bodily felt and bodily grounded act. And much as I struggle to feel my body as I type furiously, one of the acts that does make me feel the breathing, hurting, longing, gripping body is that of putting pen to paper.
Mathangi Krishnamurthy teaches anthropology for a living, and is otherwise invested in names, places, animals, and things.
