For the Love of Pens, Performed in the vain of William Shakespeare, King of Literature.
I awoke to the silence of the page. I craved the feel of my quill pen in hand, longing to see its lofty feather wafting about when I grip its powerful spine and guide it over parchment, thrusting my profound thoughts into the wet ink as they flowed through me. But my quill was gone.
I tore through the disarray of papers on my desk. I clawed at the floorboards. I dove between the sheets, under the pillows—anywhere but the empty space where my inky bedfellow should be! My desperation rose, a fever pitched, and in that chaos, the truth struck me: I am deeply, madly in love with my pen. What is this? Why do I admire it so? Is it because it's phallic? Or is this obsession deeper than the mere fondling of a shaft that does my bidding? Perhaps it is the ancient, primal scream of the scribe meeting the resistance of the world.
Let us travel back five thousand years. Mesopotamia. The mud is wet. The clay awaits its use. The first authorial tool was not a pen. It was a stylus made of hard things. Metal. Bone. Ivory. Unyielding things pressed into the earth or scraped across it! We didn’t write our thoughts then. We conquered them. Digging our consciousness into the earth, forcing it to remember us.
But the king demands grace! So came the reed pen. Split at the tip! Filled with thick, viscous pigment. A revolution! Now we slide. We glide. The reed pen allowed the scribe to whisper thoughts onto the page, mirroring the fluid, yet chaotic, dance of the human mind.
Then, sixth century, the quill. Feathers! Plucked from the wings of unsuspecting birds, dipped in gall ink, made from iron salts. Strong, iron. Delicate quill. It bent. Yielded. The quill was a lover, not a fighter. It offered flow and more control than any scribbling tool before it. And who doesn't like a little control over their flow?
But I am a man of stamina! A man of endurance! Enter eighteenth century. The metal nib. Hard. Cold. Unbreakable! Nib. Does that not sound deliciously phallic? A steel tip that drinks in the ink and spits out truth. Oh, had I been alive to have an indestructible nib of my very own!
And then the fall. The decline! The nineteenth century gave way to… the ball point, the felt tip, the blah blah blah. Disposable. Plastic. Cheap. These things I know nothing of, having expired before their invention. I have no desire to see a future where writing is reduced to a smear produced by a finite charlatan of a tool.
My point however, fellow subjects of the written word, is that humankind never stopped hunting for the perfect vessel to carry our souls. From bone to the reed, from feather to steel, we chase the tool that can perfectly capture the brightness of our psyche, ever shifting.
And so, I, Joey Handcock, the King of Literature—a man ever-shifting, ever-improving, ever writing—must possess the ultimate weapon.
-Joey Handcock