The weekend saw the clocks go forward, our first sunny day marking the start of Spring, and the start of Global Poetry Writing Month. I raced through Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the coffee gets cold and its sequels. A fulsome review will follow, but I haven’t been able to stop recommending the books for their warmth and their exploration of a very difficult question. Each book’s opening pages ask you If you could go back, who would you want to meet? A truly fantastic way to foreshadow what follows, but you carry the blanket nostalgia all through your time with the books. I have existed in that state since, yearning, over the past few days for parts of my pasts, and accepting, slowly, that these pasts are not my present parts.
This is how I am coping.
This afternoon, I purchased Before the coffee gets cold for a dear friend and wrote a short note in the front of the book. I have, over the past two years, essentially moved to living entirely digitally. I mostly take handwritten notes on my iPad nowadays, so getting to witness the shapeliness of my crooked (read, beautiful) cursive on paper once more was joyful. Yet a tinge of something unfamiliar wafted over me. The writing wasn’t slanting, I could draw ruled lines between my letters. The discomfort came from it being a strange experience from a faraway time. A heavy pen, the ink spilling, the worry of the words not quite flowing. The familiar, long-forgotten beast.
Why don’t I write anymore? Ah, that gnawing thought. I examined my short three-sentence note, dated, and grinned. My brain drew the connecting line, squealing with joy – my lack of writing by hand seems to be manifesting in terms of reduced verbose creativity. I do not want to generalise, but I have noticed that living digitally has changed the confidence with which I spill words out onto the page. If you have followed this blog for long enough, you know that I do not enjoy editing. This blog has been the one space I edit nothing at all. I sit, and whatever flows, flows. However it meanders, it meanders. Yet the ease of the backspace has meant all I do nowadays is edit. I have starter trouble more frequently. I have written about this.
So of course I spent the evening cleaning out my pens and filling ink. I write mainly with fountain pens. I dabbled with the odd gel and ballpoint pens, but nothing stuck around for long enough. Some pens refused to write. I spent an hour cleaning them out. They all write now. They’re in front of me as I type: one from Grade 5, one from Grade 7, one from Grade 10, two from first-year of University, and two graduation gifts.
I’m going to keep a notebook with me through the day. I don’t know how I will use it, but I’d like to set it out when I take my laptop/iPad out wherever I am. Apparently there’s something called a commonplace notebook. I need to read more. For now, I am not a thought, but an inkling once more.
Tejas Rao 