Dear me.
Honorary Penquod crew member Ken has been in touch to pose a curious question about the situation described in my previous post. If, he asks, the Pelikan Blue that emerges from the nib is more than the colour that it will become over time (because of the fading I described), shouldn't we select our inks for their future properties, not their appearance in the present?
It's a good question, and I may have to rethink my entire relationship to ink. I'm used to focussing on what a colour is, not what it will be, and even less what it will have been. (Jean-François Lyotard notes somewhere that the future anterior -- what will have been -- is the tense of postmodernity; I hereby pronounce that it will also have been the tense of postmoderninkty.) Might there even be colour which I despise when it first settles upon the page, but which then slowly transforms into a shade to admire? Could I be forced to endure ugliness in the present for beauty in the future? I'm perfectly used to failure ('Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.'), but am I entering a stage where I have to aim wide of the mark deliberately? (I'm reminded at this point of something that I often see while playing with Baby Ink in the park. The children's area overlooks a small bowling green, where, in the summer months, I regularly catch sight of people in their smart white uniforms rolling black bowls gently across the grass. I'm fascinated by the way in which, because the bowls are not symmetrical, the players don't actually aim straight at the jack. The trick, as this handy YouTube video explains, is to master how the bowl curves as it travels.)
Writing, as I've noted in previous posts, always involves a complicated relationship between past and present. As soon as I make legible marks with my pen, I open a future for my inscription; it will be there for reading, for interpretation, at later moments, perhaps even when I no longer exist. (This is why Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida have all proposed that writing and death are inextricably linked.)
But I can now see, in the light of Ken's question, that matters are more complicated that I inkitially thought. Confronting my own mortality with each stroke of my pen is just the beginning (of the end); I also have to take into account the way in which the ink with which I am writing has a body that will decay, change, respond to the passage of time. I've been so caught up with my own dying that I've overlooked the dying of the dyeing agent. We're fading together.
The passage of time is on my mind for another reason, dear readers, for I received yesterday, out of the blue, an email from someone who taught me when I was an undergraduate a decade and a half ago. I haven't been in touch with him during the last fifteen years, so I was surprised when his email asked the following question: am I the author of Ink Quest? ('Is it you?', read the subject line of his messagel; I was tempted to reply with the phrase that George Costanza claims to have invented: 'It isn't you; it's me'.)
I have absolutely no idea how he put two and two together. (Memo to Anonymity Department of the Penquod: room for improvement.) My work email address is in the public domain, of course, as is my photograph, because I'm an employee of a public institution, so my professional, public self is no secret. But the subject who writes this blog has no name, no email address, and no identifying features. The two figures exist in different realms, different time zones (the Penquod switched to the decimal clock several years ago), different universes. They never talk -- or even write -- to each other. They don't even like each other.
This curious collision of past and present has, perhaps because it followed so closely the question raised by honorary Penquod crew member Ken, prompted me to consider the relationship between 2009 and my undergraduate years in the early-mid 1990s, when I was taught by the author of yesterday's unexpected email. Would he recognize me if I passed him in the street today? Am I the same now as I was then? And would I recognize him? I have a crystal-clear image in my mind of what he looks like, and I can hear his voice as if he were in the room now, but I have no way of taking the last fifteen years into account.
A regular feature in the Sunday Times sees public figures writing letters to their teenage selves ('Dear 16-year-old me'...); the younger self then gets chance to reply to the adult. (I don't know if I've explained that very well. Why don't you just click here to see the most recent example?) With yesterday's event in mind, I offer, dear readers, my own conversation with my selves:
Dear 19-year-old me:
- You have just arrived at university in the south of England. You are the first person anywhere in your family to go university. You have no idea what to expect. You were politely warned in your interview for the place that you would, because you attended a state comprehensive school on the wrong side of the Wye, perhaps stand out a little among the largely privately educated -- and largely English -- students. 'Do you think you can handle that?', you were asked. 'I can give as good as I get', you replied.
- You notice within the first week of teaching that everyone else seems to have been prepared for university by their secondary schools. They know what a 'bibliography' is, and they don't have to ask about the difference between a lecture and a seminar. This sense of not belonging where others 'naturally' will remain with you.
- You attend your first seminar. Your young tutor has also recently arrived at the university. He once taught in Poland. He quotes Marx; your teachers in school only ever quoted the rules. As the year passes, that seminar becomes the place where you first encounter some of the texts and ideas that changed who you are -- and that you now teach to the next generation of undergraduates. (You still have your copy of David Lodge's anthology of literary theory.) That same tutor will also, in time, introduce you to the world-altering fiction of, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Herman Melville. You will never forget an in-class discussion of the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. When Twin Peaks airs for the first time on television some weeks into the term, the series becomes a topic of conversation in seminars. At one point, your tutor invites the class to analyse the opening credits for clues relating to the identity of Laura Palmer's killer.
- You somehow discover that your tutor likes Van Morrison, whom you are pathetically trying to emulate on stages around the city. You discuss 'On Hyndford Street'; he tells you that there is an unreleased sung version to accompany the official spoken incarnation. You wonder why secondary school couldn't have been like this.
- Towards the end of your time as an undergraduate, your tutor gives you your first real break when he mentions an essay that you've written for his course to a colleague who is editing a book in a related area. The essay ends up in print, and you have no doubt that this persuades the state to fund your MA and PhD. Without that funding, you would not have been able to carry on.
- You pay no attention to the writing instrument used by your tutor, simply because you have yet to take an inkterest in such things. (Perversely, you have in your drawer the Parker 61 that your grandfather left to you when he died, on the understanding that you would take it to university, but you have not been able to figure out how to fill the pen, so you buy cheap rollerballs from the university stationery shop.) You will, in 2009, when your former tutor has miraculously identified you as the author of Ink Quest, conclude that he must have taught you for all those years with a fountain pen on the desk in front of him.
Dear adult Inkanthropist:
- Ink? Ink? Is that all I have to look forward to?
I don't know how long Blogger will exist; it's not made of real ink, so its permanence is open to doubt. But I have the handwritten version of this entry in one of my notebooks, dear readers, and I will now file it away and not revisit it until 4 November 2024, when I will, if I still exist, be in my mid-fifties. Dear me...
Ink in use today: Pelikan Blue; Omas Sepia.

































































