elizabethlevett

It’s early evening and quiet, and anything that might not yet have been taken care of during the day can wait until tomorrow. Time to sit at the kitchen table with this pen and this notebook. It’s time to write – with no specific aim aside from the practice itself. This ritual.

There is the tactile sensation, of course, the slight resistance as the nib scratches along the velvet smoothness of the notebook paper. Then there is the visual experience, the making of letters, or words on the page. Just imagine, the most wondrous books in any library were written one letter at a time.

I hear my friend Merijane’s tender instructions in my head: “Move your pen and simply let the words come.” Enjoy the feel of the nib skating across the surface of the paper, the flow of ink, the curl of the letters, the grace of this small instrument. Merijane was a graphic artist when I met her in the days before graphics became a job accomplished on a computer, the days of drafting tables and blueprint machines. I remember her meticulously cleaning her pen nibs, each one carefully rinsed and laid out on a paper towel. Years later we we’d write together and share whatever we were working on, sitting in her sunny kitchen. I’ll never forget her writing or the way she held her pen, very much like this one, with its perfect nib and glorious flow of ink.

When I was small, I couldn’t wait to learn to write, to acquire that mysterious superpower, to learn the secret code of laying down meaning so artfully. I would watch my mom’s gentle focus as her hand seemed to spin out graceful curving script, my dad’s precision, and flare — his heavy, yet measured cursive a reflection of his drafting skill, so bold and striking. Lately, trying to organize some papers, I came across a tiny envelope on which my mother had written, in pencil, so neatly, so deliberately, “Buttons for raincoat.” To come across this scrap of her beautiful handwriting was like discovering a most potent talisman. I could suddenly see and touch and hear her again; could somehow re-enter our old confidences and conversations after all these years of silence. It’s like finding a handwritten letter or card from someone who’s no longer here or reading through the notebooks – all those notebooks Merijane left behind, filled with her thoughts and experiences written in her gorgeous, elegant handwriting.

If books, letters, journals, and other documents hold the power to possess nearly visceral memory, then a pen or pencil, and a sheet of paper or a notebook must surely be the instruments of a very powerful magic. I type when I’m ready to type, but somehow, typing simply isn’t the same. Composing in a doc never feels the same, and never, never will a page of typing, found on a laptop in some forgotten folder ever hold the same power for the reader who comes across it. This ritual then is a privilege, this table is an altar. And this fabulous old pen, for which I finally found a nib, dipped in this old bottle of “Quink” still writes beautifully after all these years.