fountain pens

penaissance

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“So…scratch my name on your arm with a fountain pen
(This means you really love me)”

-The Smiths, “Rusholme Ruffians”

Everything old is new again. This holds true for so many things, but today it’s the venerated fountain pen.

“Over the past 10 years, during which the world has adopted smartphones and social media, sales of fountain pens have risen.” The Nakaya Fountain Pen Co. in Japan saw this trend brewing and jumped on it.

I’ve written about fountain pens and their aficionados before, mostly because I find the passion people feel about this so fascinating. Apparently it can be addictive, as all my conversations with fountain ‘penthusiasts’ attest, and even the article linked above, which describes the “handfeel” of holding a pen in your hand as though it’s a transformative experience, even for the novice (not to mention the overwhelming sensory experience of being confronted with the massive choice in the stores, as described):

“The ideal way to experience a Nakaya, though, is to hold it and feel it in your hand*. The best way to test the pens is at one of the many impressive fountain pen emporiums in Tokyo: the vast Maruzen bookstore, a few blocks from the Imperial Palace; the airy rooms of stationery superstore Itoya, hidden among Ginza’s luxury boutiques; or the well-stocked specialist shop Kingdom Note in bustling Shinjuku.”

*The ‘feeling it in your hand’ entreaty is a part of the Nakaya tagline: “For your hand only”. Each pen apparently takes a minimum of three to six months to craft – just for you.

“But even a novice can identify products from Nakaya. The first clue is the color palette, which explodes in reds, greens, pinks, ochers, cornflower blues, even bright oranges, all so shiny the pens almost appear to be underwater.”

Quite sincerely, as you read about the craftsmanship that goes into a Nakaya, it starts to become clear, even to someone almost unmoved by the quiet ‘explosion’ in fountain pen ownership and use.

Photo (c) 2016 M Dreibelbis used under Creative Commons license.

Bless the eyes and hands of experience

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“If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free. The way to ensure this is to think other in the register of the same. As you construct yourself, imagine another yourself that will one day construct you in its turn. Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible level of self-consciousness that is still inseparable from the self and from the world.” –The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem

I cannot look at a lifetime of previous experience and find anything but something to be grateful for. How I could find fault with, judge or castigate someone for the things that made him who he is now, brought him to this point, where he feels, breathes, walks, runs, lives, sleeps, fucks, eats, moves in this way that is so precisely tuned to the ‘he’ that I know now?

What we should…

“You should never fall in love. Love will bring you unhappiness. If you must love, let it be when you are older, after you are thirty.” –The Setting Sun, Osamu Dazai

“The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.” –Middlemarch, George Eliot

Maybe the door has been opened, maybe my middle age has made my brain into mush. But we must use the time we have to absorb what is in books, to touch each other, to eat or revile coriander, to hear our voices reach each other and rise above the hubbub and cut through the chaotic din of our other lives to be able to say, do and be only the most uninhibited of things, to walk through the forest or along the river, to nurture and coax the best of each other, to lighten the dark path we each tread sometimes, to dare to be silly or mundane and find beauty in it, to watch a lone cat sit patiently and alert in the middle of an overgrown field before pouncing on its prey, to sing – however dumb we sound – songs that come into our heads, to fall in love (after 30 or even 40), to give and give and give until exhausted, sore and dizzy, to transform and be transformed. We can blink our eyes, and find suddenly that it is over.

Suffering is sweeter still

“but on days when I fear disappointment, I prefer to look on the dark side of things, it pulls me together and keeps me one step ahead of suffering” –So Much for that Winter, Dorthe Nors

And how sad that would be if we didn’t render our own off-key renditions of “Lover Man” while lying entangled in bed or let ourselves cry in the joy of simple closeness, in the tenderness and care of bringing a cup of coffee in the morning, or in the loss of some small thing we barely noticed when we had it, or in the beauty of how glossy and liquid fountain pen ink can look on a page (I noticed this most of all in a recent episode of American Gods – not at all surprised by the tantalizing visuals there). And how empty life could be if we (or I) only grabbed cheap ballpoint pens, cast books aside to watch Law & Order reruns, or as I was recently cautioned against doing – discarded the best person I ever knew just because I don’t know how to be with someone who is undamaged.

But where, indeed, does experience end and damage begin?

“It feels like nothing matters in our private universe.”