open windows

“You must know that if there are ruts,
you must jump your wheels out of them,
and if there is no language in which to reach
your audience, you must invent one.”

~ Austin Marsden Farrer, from Called to be Saints.

graphite

Pencil journals are for my flow of ideas, and the more pocketable, the better. The smallest Moleskine notebooks are very useful for this. I've been using their Boston themed journals, adding my own mementos to make these like scrapbooks.

ink

My daily journals must be free of lines- completely blank. My mother taught me how to write before I learned in school; no guidelines or grids, thank you very much! My taste for fountain pens is thanks to my father. There are many good pens out there- such as Waterman, Dupont, Diplomat, and Cross, but for me there's nothing quite as smooth and solid as a Caran d'Ache.
Many good inks, too- such as Pelikan, Mont Blanc, Monteverde, Diamine, and- yes- Caran d'Ache.

Ballpoints are great for writing aboard jostling buses and trains, when I have to lean more into the notebooks. Waterman and Diplomat make nice ballpoints, but for many years Ballograf has been tops for me. The designer of these invented the push-button pen, and he also designed the pens used by astronauts in space. They are made in Sweden, and I bought the set in this photo in Norway. I use the .5 mechanical pencil for marginal notes.

typewriting

As surely as I am my father's son, I love a good, dependable portable typewriter that can be taken anywhere. Nothing fits the bill quite like an Olympia. Durable and precise. I made the typecast pages above on a cursive-writing Olympia SM9. I do a lot of my writing on disc-bind paper, which snaps into Levenger binders. I've found this to be a great way to journal, and these items are easy to travel with. In the photo below, which I took in the Boston Public Library courtyard, you can see one of the Levenger binders decorated with a pencil motif!

notes

A bit of the creative process: Here is the outline I wrote- at the Weston Priory- en route to the essay, "before us." The finished essay followed this sequence. The important thing was to write this down while I had the concept in mind.

The poem, "so they say" was sketched out in my graphite journal. I made many changes, based on how it sounded when I'd read it aloud. These pencil notebooks are ideal for designing my essays and collecting additional thoughts.

____________________________________________

peaks and points

“The pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along,
unfolding itself in scene-pictures
that succeeded itself in stately procession.”

~ Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.

Now returned from a retreat and back to the grind, as always I hope for the fresh inspiration to remain with me. My eight days in the Berkshires are now memories. Returning to work is necessary for the provision of sustenance. In a parallel sense, pausing the quotidian pace is essential for the spiritual health needed to endure. For those without the good fortune- or the monetary fortunes- for subsidized sabbaticals, there is the concept of a self-guided retreat. Through my most destitute, least compensated years, I’ve made sure to give myself occasional, modest, healthful changes of environment. After 22 years of making retreats, I’ve never once regretted any of my own imposed intermissions. No matter the season or situation, it’s been vital to pause repetitious routines, when possible; in recent years, that’s been about every six months. In an indirect way, personal retreats actually contribute to my employment productivity and my general perspective.

Without meaningful, edifying breaks, the years would roll all the more as seamless backdrops. Recalling my time in school (comprising some 40% of my life’s years), spans of days accumulated by units of academic terms and semesters. Afterwards, it startled me to notice how clumps of months quickly became revolving years. I’ve been interspersing as many of these as I can with pilgrimages and various scholarly, artistic sojourns. The many and colorful travels do stay with me; these are treasured chapters for which no bulleted résumé could encapsulate. Perhaps, someday, these salutary and thoughtful experiences will be well-regarded in a workplace; but that is not the purpose for spiritual growth and insight. Creativity and contemplation are worth too much to be subjected to the conditional and the fleeting. Being a lifelong artist, I’m long accustomed to maintaining an undergirding shadow-career that tunnels beneath the work that pays my bills (and permits me to make creative diversions). And that will have to do, as long as there is time and space to write.

Indeed, time and space to write can take various forms and quantities. The most vital ingredient in a creative pursuit is perseverance. If it is writing, the most important thing is to keep writing. Words must be assembled and recorded. Opportunities must be made, at every possible turn, to cultivate ideas. Ordinarily, my chances occur during early mornings, lunch breaks, and late at night. Weekends provide some oases, as well. Place can itself be a source of inspiration. Even the humblest in my neighborhood can go to the ocean’s edge. It is the way we can see a horizon, in a region of crags, hills, towns, and ridges. The Maine coast is not a place of wide, flat plains and straight roads. My home terrain has influenced my tastes for asymmetrical and meandering scenery. Vermont’s Green Mountains, and the landscape of my recent navigation in the Berkshires and along the Housatonic, are at once grand and intimate. In close proximity, the waterways manifest as river paths, streams, channels, passing under bridges, and inspiring lines on my pages.

The retreats would not avail much, without lived followthrough amidst the drudgery. Grim as it may sound, the fruits of the Spirit are meant to bloom and sustain in ungratifying places. Not that I go looking for inhospitable conditions. A disciplined soul is tested in situations of abasement and abounding alike. A lunch break’s writing, similar to a distant pilgrimage, can be an occasion for renewed strength. It is all in the stream of keeping vigil, all tributaries in the cause of continuity. In the historic definition, a pilgrimage is a great deal more than intentional travel to a sacred place and the time spent there. It is also the journey back. Surely, fresh after a mountaintop experience, the return trip does feel very different from the outbound. Refreshed perspective causes ordinary places and situations to look extraordinary. Even the first few days back at work have something of a novelty. The proving-grounds come later; they always do. I choose not to think about this during a retreat. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Above: Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Below: rejuvenating coffee break, between workday shifts.

Since returning from the Berkshires, where I saw spring forests foresee summer, I’ve made sure to be outdoors as much as possible. Hiking in the proximate Maine woods, I make note of parts which are similar to the places of my Western Massachusetts immersion. Granted, the nearby Kennebec is vaster and more vigorous than the Housatonic, the smaller river is no less ancient and inviting. Within that latter aspect is the procession of Berkshire towns that follow the waterway. The natural and built places alike comprise the river’s character. Added to the equation is the context of my journey. I was there to be on retreat, to be among a monastic community of prayer, and to savour the surroundings. We can see our purposes in our intended destinations, and can derive strength as intention meets discovery. In its trail, in a river-like sense, there follows and flows the serendipitous. This would include people met in transit, with their words; suppers, roads, aromas, and artifacts. Like the allegorical Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows, “absorbed in the new scents, the sounds, and the sunlight.” The sojourn really has changed my perspective, and it’s a good thing I continued writing, recording thoughts, along the way.

notes in the Berkshires.

Red Lion Inn postscriptum

While staying at the fascinating Red Lion Inn, I noticed a wall-hanging (below) near the entrance to a parlor. It is filled with pencils, and is reminiscent of an old-fashioned workshop apron.

pencil pensive

“An observing spirit
can thus derive pleasure from the most
trivial circumstance.”

~ Thomas Cogan, Treatise on the Passions and Affections of the Mind.

familiar, yet anew

In this fledgling, burgeoning season yet untracked, I take up the pencil anew. Just as the approach of Labor Day weekend annually brings school beginnings past to mind, so late-April rain rekindles the sense of semester-end promise. Gradually, it is becoming easier to write outdoors. Lengthened days remind me to get out and away from walls and ceilings- when possible. Apparently there is life to be lived, aside from the constant dawn-to-dusk workday grind. As daunting as inertia can be, rote repetition of denial has its detriments. Self-limitation can become a debilitating habit. By recollection and writing, at least in spirit I can vault the fence. It does mean expending energy, for a measure of transcendent vigilance. But it’s worth it, and the alternatives would be still more regrettable.

Back when I had some schedule flexibility at my job, I’d take my coffee breaks outside- even in winter- as daily as I could. Occasionally this is still possible. My pocketable idea journals- after which I named this blog- have been constant companions for years. The musings and fragments are the ingredients for essays to be developed. Aperch on a public bench or at an outdoor café, I’d scratch down the date and time, then pencil some ruminating words beneath the quick heading, graphite today. Not exactly enough time for substantial stream-of-consciousness writing; perhaps more like rivulets. Such trivial habits create links that maintain the vital momentum of inquiry and ideas. Re-reading the lines and pages of these small books help me retrace my discoveries and thought processes- and at present I’m able to retrieve morsels of confidence to continue.

new season

At the season’s threshold, attending a baseball game, it was impressive to see the bright and well-tended grass on the field. The rest of Portland is still shaking off the ashen grit of a protracted winter. But the pleasant distraction of time measured out by innings has similarities with my writing intermissions: these microcosm journeys have lives of their own. Within the common threads are my pencilled notations. The intricacies of play-by-play baseball scoring are best expressed in sharp pencil. In the province of graphite, notations can be corrected and emphasized with the game’s progress. Causes to adapt a play’s documentation include a fielder’s choice, a passed ball mistaken as a wild pitch, a force-out, or a stolen base. Space needs to be made for pinch-hitters and relief pitchers. As umpires will occasionally amend a call, the erasable medium capably responds. To erase is human, indeed.

The materials and instruments of a craft are means toward ends. In their respective contexts of writing and photography, scribal and image-recording tools serve to record perceptions. In turn, recorded thoughts are elements with which creative works are constructed. Well-crafted tools can have their own intrinsic value as objects. Such extensions of our creative selves present inherent inspiration.

For the moment, on the topic of the humble pencil, I’ve long found this particular writing medium to be as patient as it is tactile. Following pensive spells of recollection- which are misinterpreted as stoppages- a pencil will not dry out and have to be re-inked, as is necessary for pens, nor will the display of text shut off, as it happens with computer screens. I prefer writing instruments that wait for me, as opposed to my having to compensate for syntactical dissonances in the tools. (Ponder that, during your next download, update, reboot, server failure, and virus scan.) With the pace- whether fast or slow- is the proprietary way a pencil changes while it is in use. A sharpened point broadens to a smooth chisel edge that mirrors the angle of the writer’s grasp. Similar to dip-pen writing, emphasized downstrokes reflect as bolder lines. With enough writing and sharpening, a pencil transforms into something weathered. Wood dissolves into shreds and sawdust, the eraser (if there was one to begin with) flattens, and its temporal life shortens as its stamped lettering disappears. Like nutrients, pencils are provisional- vehicles that are transformed en route to their intended purposes.

ideas and speculating

Through a meandering journey measured in jots, my pencilled notions represent various reaches. Sentences scratched in curved graphite parallel my often fractured prayers: constant and unvarnished. But these held thoughts are purposeful means toward ends. I develop ideas and observations by tracking and articulating them. Pilgrimage is surely a voyage of comprehension. In the 18th century, Thomas Cogan wrote voluminously about emotion and philosophical speculation, in his Treatise on the Passions and Affections of the Mind. He described our abilities to cultivate ideas as a testament to our existence, fascinated by the ways we know that we possess our ideas. Cogan describes an idea as follows, from vol.2, p.153:

“It is that wonderful something which pertains to the thinking principle, it is its exclusive property, is indicative of an awakened state of mind, and which the mind knows to exist with such an infallible certainty, that we consider the conscious possession of ideas, as the strongest evidence of our existence.”

Speaking for myself, not all my ideas are wonderful somethings, but wonder is surely a motivating ingredient. Writing, reviewing, and writing more ideas provides a continuum of recorded motion. Thoughts may be expressed into tactile and tangible lines in a notebook, for example. Instruments and surfaces for our ideas have their primary qualities- in this instance, the intrinsic properties of the physical writing tools. From there, an individual’s creative discernment can derive secondary qualities- impressions- based upon practice and experience. Strong sunlight upon writing-paper that reflects the warm end of the light spectrum; the sound of pencil-point upon the surface; the aroma of sharpened wood; the sense and warp of paper humidified by ocean winds.

During one of my always-enlightening lunches with an elderly Chinese colleague, we talked about classical “thinking gestures.” Comparing generalities and tendencies of East and West, we noted the tradition exemplified in Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, with head-holding gesture. My friend described the Asian gesture of a “thinking philosopher” as having folded hands across one’s torso. This brought up how western spiritual practice has tended to emphasize the mind, compared to eastern practice emphasizing the heart. Even the classic Eastern Christian teaching about contemplation has been to “descend into the heart” so as to make ascent.

Above: Rodin's Thinker;
Below: Korean Scholar, 16th century.

One day last week, having successfully stolen away to read and write, I suddenly noticed my own gesture while trying to fathom a very complex text. My hand tends to prop my forehead, while holding a pencil. Comprehension may require writing down something! Hence the digestion by the soul, via the craftsman’s motion. Pursuing the essence of the sacred draws the writing outward and onward, often drawing the map while the exploration is in progress. Realizing this, I gratefully look ahead to more graphite todays.