Drop everything: let's talk droplets.
I happened to be reminded this week of the opening of George Eliot's Adam Bede:
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.
I can't claim to have read any further than this, dear readers, for I only have to see the name 'George Eliot' and I drop off to sleep. This antipathy goes back to my time as a student of 'A' level English Literature, when we were forced to read Silas Marner. Our teacher insisted that it was one of the finest novels ever written, and spent many interminable lessons discussing the eponymous hero's tendency to experience cataleptic seizures. This was, he insisted, symbolic of what capitalism did to the human spirit in the nineteenth century. My suggestion that perhaps Silas Marner had just been made to read Silas Marner was not well received. More recently, I decided to renew my dislike for Eliot's work when a now-retired colleague for whom I had remarkably little respect announced, in the week that Don DeLillo's Underworld was published, that Middlemarch was, and would always be, The Greatest Novel Ever Written. 'DeLillo's just a pretender', he sneered.
But back to Adam Bede. A colleague for whom I have huge amounts of respect drew my attention to this wonderful opening passage a couple of years ago, but, perhaps because of my longstanding feud with George Eliot, I managed to repress its existence until I saw the inky lines in print again several days ago. I know that I will never read Adam Bede, but I do think that there's something special about its 'inkipit'. What it recognizes so well, I think, is the possibility embodied in every drop of ink. With ink, we can go anywhere.
One of the things I like most about writing with real ink is the transformation of every drop of coloured fluid into sentences that didn't exist until I put pen to paper. Yes, users of ballpoint or rollerball pens can also turn a blank page into one teeming with meaning, but there's a crucial difference when a fountain pen is involved: the writer was responsible for filling the pen, either from a bottle or with a cartridge. In other words, he or she has come into close (sometimes very close) contact with the shapeless liquid, has placed it tenderly inside a writing instrument, and can then watch as the formless substance miraculously emerges drop by drop from the nib to find a form recognizable to all those who can read the language in question. To put matters differently, a user of a fountain pen has made the writing instrument capable of forming drops of ink, and is then intimately present as those drops drop into place, into shapes, into meaning.
The narrator of Adam Bede appears to recognize this: from that single drop of ink at the end of the pen can come a description of 'the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799'. From the fluid, a vision. From the drop, a universe. And all of this where there was previously nothing. The blank page receives the drops and starts to signify.
I am typing these words less than a metre from a box containing dozens of bottles of ink. (When did I last count or catalogue them? Will my urge to collect ever show signs of dropping off?) It's a little dizzying to think about how many drops lie within, how many words and worlds I could create at the drop of a hat, but that sense of inkfinite possibility is part of what drives the Penquod and prevents it from ever dropping anchor.
It's late; I'm fit to drop. Thanks for dropping by.
Inks in use today: Sailor Grey; Diamine Chocolate Brown.
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