…or, How I Wrote A Letter, With A Fountain Pen, On Paper, And Mailed It To Someone Two Weeks In The Future, And Half A World Away.
I bought a new camera – a Nikon D850.
It’s new, as in it’s a current product made by Nikon, and still manufactured, and for sale fresh from the factory. It was also launched in 2017. Seven years old, and still arguably the finest 35mm DSLR ever produced. With Nikon seemingly all-in on mirrorless cameras, likely it will become the finest 35mm DSLR that will ever be produced.
Choosing to buy the last of an older paradigm was a real decision, but the simple truth is, I don’t like mirrorless cameras. I don’t want to look at a little television screen, and frame my shot on that. I want to look through the lens, at the real world, and capture that moment. If I was going to buy a mirrorless camera, I think I’d be tempted to go stranger, with something like a Hasselblad digital back, with a 500 series (or technical camera) body.
If I were to compare the D850 to its mirrorless replacement; the Z8, which is almost twice the price; the Z8 only has an sRGB viewfinder – you don’t even see the full colour gamut your sensor can resolve, let alone the true colour of the world through the lens. In the fourteen months since the Z8’s launch, Nikon has released a significantly cheaper, lower-end Z6 III, which has a P3 gamut viewfinder. Still not the full AdobeRGB most photography processes work within, but significantly better than the Z8.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re in the early days of a new paradigm, the things you buy will likely become obsolesced by cheaper, newer versions. In all likelihood I will never have buyer’s remorse over my D850, because there will never be a better version of this camera. If I had bought the Z8, I’d already feel put out over having to compromise on viewfinder quality to get higher image quality, versus the cheaper, newer, lower-end camera.
Where is this going, and how does it relate to fountain pens?
So I decided to write a letter to someone I hope is still a friend, but with whom I lost contact perhaps six to eight years ago. I have an email address, and a Twitter handle for them, but those are either out of use, or I’m perhaps not friends with this person any more, because things I’ve sent in the intervening years have elicited no response.
I have a phone number for them, but given the aforementioned silence, I can only feel it would be an intrusion to call. When we were still talking, they gave me the address of a wonderful house they had bought, hence the letter.
I have not written any significant amount of text since I tore the sagittal band of my middle finger on my dominant hand several years ago. Despite the months of hand-traction, and therapy, and rehab, it never returned to pre-injury condition. It still feels weak, it still lacks some stability, and it still provokes debilitating psychological trauma responses at the memory of the injury itself when it twinges. Compounded with neurological damage which scrambles a lot of the sensation down the side of my hands and little fingers, the idea of writing with a pen and paper was something I approached with trepidation.
My art kit contained a tool for the job – an inexpensive clear plastic fountain pen. More for drawing than a fine writing implement, I suspect. it has a nifty archimedes-screw ink cartridge, which draws up ink when it needs refilling. Fountain pens can be problematic for left-handers. A left-to-right script requires the left hander to push the nib, rather than dragging it as for a right hander. Then we get to the text being obscured by one’s hand, and the smudging which can occur. Some hand-gymnastics can solve the former, but the latter was alleviated with some Mont Blanc waterproof permanent black ink. It dries super quickly, and doesn’t smudge from skin moisture. The downside is it dries in the nib, so requires frequent cleaning with glass-cleaner, which then takes time to work out of the nib so you’re back to writing with ink.
However, when it all comes together, oh wow. I wrote draft, after draft, after draft of the aforementioned letter. When the pen played up because it needed cleaning, or I made an egregious typo, or my hand just ran away scribbling marks faster than I could supply control… Start again, re-write.
Handwriting takes practice, and I’m still not even remotely capable of neat, regular cursive. That will require slowing down, a lot to regain the muscle memory. For now, merely keeping my somewhat-joined chicken scrawl printing consistent and legible is a real challenge. Especially after so many years of thinking in comics terms, where everything is written in upper case.
I wrote the letter, over and over, like a monk illuminating a manuscript as an act of devotion. Eventually, it was as much the thing I wanted it to be, as I could make it, and I put it in an envelope, masked-up, and visited the Post Office.
From there, the letter began its transit to a destination two weeks in the future, and on the other side of the world.
I’ve only ever had one pen-friend – in the era before email. We wrote back and forth a number of times, I still have the letters. Artefacts of the hand of a person, moments of their life, spent and unrecoverable, distilled to a physical object.
I miss that connection – when someone’s thoughts were manifest in a unique object they sent you. I imagine it’s an intellectual and emotional Skin Hunger – made all the more terrible by a world in which people are simultaneously too busy to write letters, and yet often unwilling to use technology to do video calls.
A toast therefore, to the joy of using a fountain pen. Just like my new camera, there is an experiential quality to older methodologies – the real, the physical, the practical. Looking through the lens, making a mark with ink.
Hail to the Real.