Fountain Pen

Today, I was in the bookstore because I like to hang out in bookstores sometimes (actually pretty often whenever if I am around them), and I found myself in the stationery corner. Pretty soon thereafter, I found myself scratching away at one of those sample papers they keep around the pen section, with a beautiful fountain pen that they had also left out for people like me to try out. I’m sure people were looking at me funny at this point; this girl standing in front of all the pens, standing there for probably five to ten minutes…writing who knows what on those tiny sample papers, page after page, oblivious to the people passing through the aisle or standing nearby, flipping through magazines.

The thing is, now, I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what exactly I had written. I just know that I couldn’t stop. It was perhaps the magic of the fountain pen. That slight catch that the tip of the pen has on the surface of the paper, so that with every stroke, you are pulling, stretching it out on the fibers beneath. The act of writing itself becomes so very a part of the expression, more than just the words. The movements themselves come alive, and I am caught in its flow, the words no longer coming from me…it is rather like I am following the pulls of the next stroke, feeling them out like I would with my hands outstretched in the dark.

I felt that I was much closer to the art of writing than when I am using any other form. Maybe it’s my imagination, but there is definitely a certain magic and beauty to the fountain pen. Enough to leave me stranded in its enchantment for a good ten minutes until I felt my dad tug at my shirt that I’d been there long enough and that we needed to leave to actually finish our errand.

I wish I could have stayed there in the dark with my hands outstretched.

(Or if I’d brought my wallet so I could have made that fountain pen mine and we could have spent hours on the floor with my journal, listening and feeling each other out.)

03. Identify the essentials. Eliminate the rest.

“Creativity is subtraction.”

The thing that comes to mind when I read this is the story, (I don’t know its authenticity,) of Michelangelo and his sculpture. The point of the story was that he started with a giant shapeless block of marble, and by chipping and carving away at this mass, subtracting what was unnecessary- the negative space, he would reach his ultimate piece. All that was left: the positive shape of a figure or an object.

Creativity lies in knowing what is irrelevant. What is essential to the subject at hand. Identifying the line between these two and carefully shedding the unnecessary. There is beauty in simplicity. The essential is what moves you. Everything else is distraction. Noise. 

It is a mistake (I have no authority to say this, outside of my own idea) if someone thinks that creating something is the addition of parts to make a whole. The fact is that the creators, from the noise of the world, carve away the nonessentials. They make sense of the chaos around them and interpret what it is that matters. What matters, of course, is subjective, to the creator and to the viewer, but it is the creativity and the act of creating that allows “what matters” to happen and to be perceived. 

As a creator, (anyone is, if they have created anything), I would say that we start with a whorl of an idea or few or a hundred. It is a cloud of something. We squint and look. Tilt our heads and lean forwards. We search. From that something, we strip away and mine for the truth that we hear singing to us. There, that truth, what remains through the process of subtraction afterwards, is what we have created, it’s what stirs something within us and moves us as a way of life. A message, an emotion, a song, a vision, a direction.