The last six weeks have found me writing profusely in long hand. Writing long hand is my preferred method and style. It has a romantic feel to it and is the closest I come as a writer to the experience a reader has with a page turner of a book. Long hand is also my prefered method of penning the many letters I will write to friends and loved one's alike over the path of the year instead of email. November and December are the times when I like to write letters to people, with the book ends of Thanksgiving and New Years holding up Christmas, there is much to reflect on and yet still much more to write about in journals, note books and the odd collection of ideas and topics to explore when i have time that gather atop tables and in draws all around the house and the studio.
Recently, however, I have been going through pens at an alarming rate. I seem to be running out of ink in my favorite pens and ink wells all at once. I have had to dip into my back stock of pens, pencils and ink I stockpiled from the closing of my office unlike at any other time in my professional life that I can recall. It got me thinking about the scarcity of ink in other times and in previous generations and what we can learn from it. How can we, in these times, the age of the internet and email, the computer and electronic documents, cell phones and text messages, Blackberry's and television, relate to how it must have impacted the lives of our fore bearers across the globe to have a scarcity of ink.
The purpose of all these mediums I mentioned, including pen and ink, is simple to communicate. It is to facilitate the exchange and transfer of ideas and content. In our times, the cell phone and the scarcity of minutes is probably what compares best for me to the scarcity our fore bearers must have experienced when they ran out of ink as a scarce and costly resource that was necessary to transact all aspects of life. I can imagine how the common professional, such as an Student, a young architect or an aspiring writer had to be resourceful to keep themselves in ink. I imagine, unless you were of some means, ink was a luxury many could do with out and thus it stifled the growth of ideas from odd corners of society. Where there vendors capable of securing for a paying customer sufficient quantities of ink to keep a manuscript going? What type of ingenious methods were people forced to innovate and invent to cultivate a good constant supply of ink?
Since I recently restructured my life and curtailed back my expenditures, my 5000 minute luxury cell phone plan has had to be paired down to a reasonable level that I can afford on my very limited income these days. It has maid for minute counting like never before. I watch every minute, I talk try to save my phone conversations for those off peak hours and weekends when I can communicate with the outside world at a reasonable cost. Instead, I prefer to write and communicate by mail where I can write quite a bit for the cost of a 42 cent first class stamp.
In thinking back to my life in Ghana in the 1970's (where I was born and raised until the age of 11), it was customary to send letters with people who were traveling overseas to post for you when they arrived at their foreign destination. The thought process was that the postal system elsewhere was far more dependable that the local Ghanaian postal system. I wrote back then with inexpensive pens and pencils. I recall writing letters to pen pals that took took weeks and even months to get to them. It was a struggle back then in the heat and humidity of the Acccra region climate, to keep the ink in the inexpensive ball point pens we purchased from the road side vendors around the City and at market. I recall receiving letters from friends posted two to three months earlier according to the originating postmark, with beatiful penmanship in ink that looked bleautiful and luxurious. Many of the street boys I played and ran around with (against my mothers wishes), could not read or write. Some did not even go to school. The concept of using an ink pen or pencil was a far fetched concept for many. I saw first hand the stifled ideas of many smart young boys. Destined to lives as laborers because of the scarcity of writing materials and especially ink.
Looking back a little further to the turn of the nineteenth century through the great depression and the second world war era when cell phones did not exist, writing in the west was deeply important to the life blood of the growing industrialization of the world. Typing was still a luxury and ink was the primary method of recording all types of information. I am currently researching the life of a prominent citizen and business in the Tacoma area. In reviewing some of his business records, it is clear how important ink was to his operations. His records show significant orders of ink being placed above many other consumables. I read somewhere that inflation overtime can be pegged to the cost of a mans suit ensemble over time. I wonder if the same assessment can be made for ink?
I recently had to switch pens in mid letter to my partner Jill. I proudly informed her in the letter, after switching over to a new ink pen that I was one of the few people I knew, who new from actual use how many words you can actually get from the average modern pen. Whether its 6,000 or 20,000 words or some other number depending on your preferred brand, whether you are a heavy writer or a lighter scribe, it is humbling to me consider how we take ink and pen for granted as we do in this time.
I can't imagine what would happen to all my ideas and yours if we could not write them down. I think of the impact that ink has had on the passing of knowledge from the past on to us today. I think of the lost knowledge and the lost concepts and ideas, that hove been lost because of convenient access to ink. Whether made of mineral pigments or of plant extracts, I can very easily imagine an absent minded scholar of a different era, locked away for weeks and days, penning way at a manuscript in his studio, a seminal work that would lead humankind to a formula that could be the missing link of understanding some plague, he has a "eureka" moment, envisions the formula for an instant, goes to dip his quill in the ink well to record it, and discovers...it is empty.
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