Feeling tender in a devastating world
A feeling of tenderness often accompanies my use of stationery.
I love my pens. I love a good notebook. A beautiful ink in its bottle is a small treasure; and it has to be glass, has to have good labels: like an old apothecary. Somehow, I feel differently about my stationery than about most things; pens and notebooks are not quite things, or not only things.
The Kilk Yggdrasil pen is one of my favorites. I keep writing it dry. Here with my A6 notebook and a lid of a leather art box I bought in Estonia.
Often stationery folk have happy childhood memories of pens and notebooks. I am no exception. As a child, I lurked by my great-grandfather’s big wooden desk and watched him write music notation by hand, with a dip pen; the color and smell of his black ink was luscious. Some years later, after my great-grandfather passed away, my grandmother found a perfect place to buy notebooks. This was in Soviet Ukraine, in L’viv; notebooks were scarce, good notebooks even more so. These were sold in a tiny field equipment store on a side street by Stryjsky park. The notebooks were smaller format, close to what I know now as a B6 size, with a rigid cover in dark green leatherlike material; they had grid paper. What I remember as a child was the smell of them, the intoxicating sweetness of thick new pages. This was a time of shortages. Every week, grandmother and I stood in long lines trying to get the basics - salt, sugar, flour - usually with no success; the food was gone by the time it was our turn. But these notebooks, and the long walk to get them, past the park -- they are a part of my private mythology.
Once my family fled the Soviet Union, it was a very long time before I could have nice things - or anything much. I was poor, on my own, putting myself through college, worried about shelter and food. My time in Berkeley as a graduate student was the first time I had a beautiful stationery experience.
The store was Castle in the Air.
My friend Kathryn took me there. The day outside was bright, but the atmosphere inside was darker, gentler on the eye. Fountain pens were laid out like jewels in their open clamshell trays, guarded by rows of Italian notebooks bound in marbled papers and trimmed in leather. The store felt like a happy, generous carnival that came to town and decided to stay. I was dazzled and charmed and quite a bit intimidated. Later, I took my mother there when she came for a visit, and she bought me a Pilot Falcon, which I used all through graduate school and beyond. I used that pen with black ink, then with blue ink. Sometimes I miss that austerity, a black pen with black ink that I bought at the carnival. It was a choice, and a mood.
I’ve moved very far away from black pen/black ink austerity. In January I sold my burgundy Scribo Piuma to a friend and picked up a second hand Scribo Feel Magenta instead. Magenta is not my color, and this pen might or might not stay, but it’s a great writer.
Good stationery often gives me a feeling of tenderness: that despite all the privation, the wars, the migrations, the intense animality of fear, the personal breakdowns - despite all this, I can hold and use a beautiful notebook or pen.
This is not a tender time. I’ve noticed my use of stationery slipping. Pen after pen ran out of ink, and I did not refill them. I washed most of them out; two are waiting in the tray. Only three are still inked. I have not journaled in a week. I’m doing many other things. Nothing I can say feels adequate for the moment.
How can we - humans with hearts and dreams -- persist in this devastating, devastated world? There are many answers to give - perseverance, community, activism, resilience. Beauty: this has always been an answer for me, or at least one of the answers. Beauty is easy to trample, to uproot; easy to disdain. It is in things imperfect, half-remembered, hidden; the beauty of worn and whispered things.
When I think about all the history I’ve lived through, I remember slivers of beauty as it once existed. I remember the honey-sweet smell of the green notebook, the light entering slant through the windows, making dust particles dance in the store on the hill; outside, the trees. These trees predated the Soviet regime — and many of them outlived it, too. I imagine that some of them were cut down, broke or withered through the years. From far away, I do not know what happened to these trees. A vision we describe is not always real. Reality alone is not enough to guide us through the toughest times; we need to dream.
Kilk Yggdrasil and Scribo Feel Arancia on a monster art plate I got in Estonia. Both are uninked.
It’s going to be a while before these half-formed thoughts of mine coalesce into a single story - perhaps they never will. Even when I write nothing, even when my pens are uninked, the story takes shape. It takes many shapes. It is taking a breath.