taking up the pen

Late in September, I announced my likely retirement from blogging. October has been silent and my site left to wither. In the list that counts the posts, down on the right side, October doesn't feature, which is better than a big fat zero next to it but telling nonetheless. A gap has opened, not just between the last post and the present day but also between my desire to write and reality. This gap has now become a chasm too wide to ignore, and the only way to close it is to fill it with words.

It has been clear to me for a while that I would continue with this, though I'm still not one bit closer to figuring out what it is that I want to write about. There has never been a unifying theme in my writing. Maybe that's for the best. My life can't be put in a neatly labeled box and neither can my attitudes, passions, interests and opinions. Life is colorful, especially in London, and if I let one interest grab me for too long, I'd miss out on the rest.

So to restart the blog – and I was wondering what the topic of the first post would be – I dive my fingers into a small glass jar of characteristic shape that once contained the gooey goodness of Bonne Maman. It now serves to store the pens I keep accumulating, most holding emotional value but some fit to write. The fingers push aside lesser objects and imposters and pick, with great care and delighted anticipation, a slick silver fountain pen, its metal body cool to the touch.

I've owned this fountain pen for a good 15 years, must have bought it right after high school when I was sure I would never again be required to write with one. By that count, in all its pointlessness, it was the ultimate vanity item. By another count, in monetary terms, it quite obviously wasn't. The pen is no Cross or Montblanc. I've gone though moments of intense desire for such pieces of high luxury but I've never caved in.

The pen is a no-name from a budget store, the kind of place I used to frequent fresh out of high school, long on wants and short on cash. For its cheapness and namelessness, the pen has lived up fabulously. Whenever I rescue it after prolonged periods of deathlike inactivity – and its life so far has been a seemingly interminable train of periods of inactivity – it is ready to go. I uncap it, wipe it clean, insert a fresh ink cartridge and moisten the nib, and it starts writing just as it did when I had just bought it.

When I was in middle school, in leaner times than now, all of us wrote with fountain pens. Such were the rules, plus there weren't many ballpoint pens around. Our people-owned companies, under the rigors of five-year plans, didn't have room for frivolous activities such as giving away biros. Who would have manufactured them in the first place? China didn't exist back then.

In conditions of scarcity, the oddest objects can acquire prestige and desirability. At some point in school, someone discovered the magic of capitalist ink cartridges. Our home-grown ink, produced in the Barock factory in the next town up the river and purchased by our moms at the local stationer's at the beginning of each school year, came in cartridges plugged with a little plastic bung. Those made on the bright side of the Wall, available only to those whose grandparents could travel West, were capped with a little glass bead that could be recovered after use, liberated from the cartridge and dropped into the hollow interior of the pen where it would roll around during use with a characteristic sound.

This rattle, which could be much amplified by vigorous shaking, set the cool apart from the lame. The cool kids had other defining marks: blue fingertips, blue spots on their lips and possible blue teeth. To extract the glass bead, the empty cartridge had to be opened first, a task that was most easily accomplished by biting off the plastic disk that sealed the other end. The cartridge then had to be washed to get the bead out, spilling blue all over. One might have looked dyspraxic, but with a pen that clattered one could smugly look down on those poor and desperate fellows who wrote in silence.

These days my pen is silent all too often. While I don't need it to make any sounds – I don't recover glass beads anymore – I would like it to make metaphorical noise, liberating the power of ideas and words and turning empty space into sense. The first step, as always, is to get going, and I've done that now. The question of why I blog hasn't been directly addressed but it's contained in this rambling discourse anyway.

Blogging takes time, demands creativity and works my brain. The reward, and the reason why I'll keep doing it, is that I like the results, sometimes right away but more often, as with a fine wine, after a suitable while. In moments of quiet reflection, or when I'm tired, down or empty, I pick a random month and frequently surprise myself with the cool things that have happened and the delightful ways they are described. Some posts are drab and inconsequential, but others are memory and enjoyment rolled into one. That's how I see it, anyway. And if it's good enough for me, it's perfect for this blog.