The postal elves left a box at my office door sometime this morning. What a treat! I hurried inside to open it, eager as a child on Christmas morning. And it was exactly what I wanted — new Black n’ Red notebooks and Pilot V-Ball pens.
This must be the way Pat feels when she gets a new shipment of paints, bushes & canvases. Oh! the possibilities!
So, although I’m not using my new notebooks yet — the one I got in Manchester, England isn’t yet full — I did break out the new Pilot V-Ball with recycled content.
I’m writing green! Well, figuratively. The ink is black.
Now what shall I write that’s fit to be writ with these new tools? A novel of epic proportions? A poem to make you weep? A non-fiction piece that will influence the outcome of the Mid-East peace talks?
What power! What pressure! What stress! How did I move from joy to guilt in three paragraphs?
Maybe I’ll be satisfied today to simply put ink on paper in the form of English words, hopefully hooked together in a way to please writer and reader — that potential reader who might one day pick up these Black n’ Red notebooks to see what the famous KW was capable of producing.
Maybe I will be KW. HD did it. (I’d rather have Monda Fason’s initials though.) KW is good. Kenworth trucks come to mind. Still, not as strong as HD. But then Kathy Wagenknecht isn’t as strong as Hilda Doolittle:
Do you ask for a scroll,
parchment, oracle, prophecy, precedent;
do you ask for tablets marked with thought
or words cut deep on the marble surface,
do you seek measured utterance or the mystic trance? ( H. D. “Demeter”)
Nevertheless….
Why does dripping an ellipsis off a “nevertheless” remind me of an old aunt of my grandmother? Was she that vague? My other memories of her are hazy. I cannot call up an image of her face. I can’t see her clothing or stance or stride or gesture. I can only hear that dripping “nevertheless” and catch a glimpse of her moving slowly away.
