My fingers are mostly healed. Healed enough at any rate.
I now have a head cold to go with my blasted fingers. I am a pretty pitiful sight, I sound like a muppet, and I've been puttering around the house guzzling green tea and vegetable broth. I've been wearing my brown fuzzy slippers and my (oversized, obnoxiously yellow, mustard velvet) bathrobe with a notebook and pen in one of its pockets, my cell phone and chapstick in the other. Everything I need, right at my scabbed-over fingertips.
I've lost all track of word count or which days I've written what. Let's pretend for sake of argument that I've still managed 500 a day, "a day" being defined as any 24 hour period where I remained awake and cognizant for the majority of the time in question. Sound fair?
The time away from the keyboard has been nice though. I think I'm a different kind of writer when I write by hand. I am by nature, a visual person. When I write by hand, I do not necessarily write in order. My mind works in clusters, webs, and clouds. With a pen, I can write an idea like a clump of clay and then gradually decide what the clay is going to actually look like when I'm done. It's actually much more conducive to my poetry. I draw sentences rather than write them. I'm more inclined to write prose when I'm at a computer. Isn't that fascinating? I suppose that's the linear half of my brain kicking in.
Sometimes I spend so much time writing on the computer that I miss the physical act of writing. I didn't used to enjoy it. Probably because I take copious notes. So when I was in school I had too much of a good thing, lecture notes, in-class essays, and the like. That kind of overkill can lead to hatred. I'm really glad it didn't.
It's because writing is so intoxicating to me, I think. Not because it's meditative or because my handwriting is nice to look at once it's filled a page (it's not, it looks dreadful, I can barely read it most of the time) or because what I've written is particularly good (it's not, trust me).
It's intoxicating because a primitive part of myself is still amazed that scratching at a blank surface can mean so much. That by acting with purpose, I can give voice and meaning to what would otherwise be spilled ink and an innocent, smooth, blank page. Flawless, down right glowing with potential. Stunning. Antagonizing. Silent. Until I can claim it, mark it, mold it. Fill it with lines and swoops, cross things out, dig my pen into the thin flesh of the page when I really mean it, like a tattoo or a hieroglyph, and let my letters skitter across the surface when I don't.
Then I turn the page. And I do it again. It's like magic.
Again and again by the force of my brain and the sweep of my fingers I transform lifeless wood pulp into a story, into ideas. My ideas may not be life altering, regime crumbling, mind blowing masterpieces. But someone, somewhere, at some time was doing the exact same thing that I'm doing, and they changed the world. And I think that's beautiful.
That's all for me today.
g'night, my darlings!
I too have a liberal definition of "day"
ReplyDeleteI totally understand!! I had this fantastic prof. in college that had us write a journal and it HAD to be hand written, and some people protested because they're so used to typing that they forgot how to think with a pen. But he insisted, and then we had this debate about it in class about how the friction between the pen and paper stimulate the nerves in your fingers, and all the neurons running through your body start firing up. And on top of that there's the rhythm of the pen strokes, and the kinesthetic quality of moving your muscles to create thoughts, as if the words literally pour out of your fingertips as you spell them.
ReplyDeleteTyping is different.
That's awesome about the neurons. I hadn't thought of that, but I like it :)
ReplyDelete