Entering the dry part of summer as the days get shorter, my mom is surviving so many of the worst parts (chemo, Whipple surgery) of one of the worst kinds of cancer (pancreatic), but aging and fading fast in some ways I did not foresee. After spending a month at her house away from home and my wife and my big solid desk and fountain pen supplies, I drained almost all of the ink in the pens I packed to go there.
Finally home for a few days after that month, I refilled four of my favorite Parker fountain pens with some of my most-treasured inks in red, brown, grey and green:
My bottles of vital inky fluids are no longer full; will I be able to get new bottles of P. W. Akkerman’s China Town Red and Taccia’s Ukiyo-e Ume Murasaki?
They say that attachments — refusing or being unable to accept that impermanence is a basic fact of life — is the cause of suffering. They also say we suffer more in our imaginations than in reality. Here I am tonight, suffering as I notice these bottles of ink are not full anymore. Fearing the emptiness to come before it even happens.
Every collector is a hoarder of things both tangible and intangible, full of fear of what can never be replaced. Building shelves and organizational systems and renting storage units, trying to keep things pristine that were designed to be loved until they were all used up and discarded.
I was surprised my mom considered having her ashes dumped in the river, she who is so afraid of drowning in swift water. Do I plan to bury my empty bottles or enshrine them on shelves? Like an alcoholic’s dried up empty liquor bottles or boxes of used-up typewriter ribbons, do we keep these around for a faint whiff of chemical reassurance there were many many hours we spent productively intoxicated?
I might have said before to burn all of my journals and notes and diaries when I die, but maybe sinking them in that river where we grew up would make more sense. Letting all of the colors and things I used to care about run free. The obsessive tortured thoughts and plans and runny streams of bullshit erased by dilution.
Here I am at this stage in my Pleasure Writing hobby / study / practice journey: with a small collection of ink bottles acquired over the past two or three years giving me a great deal of colorful pleasure and therapy. At the point where just as I am running out of room for them and “need” to clear more space to house them, I am also depleting them enough to be confronted with that most basic fact; these bottles of ink are not going to last forever.
It’s not the kind of thing you are coached to prepare yourself for (even though I’ve read Mountain of Ink Kelli and other fountain pen enthusiasts lament getting down to the last dregs of this or that precious ink that is no longer in production, many times). But it’s a bit like going to the fridge when you’re broke and thirsty only to find someone in the house drank all but a tablespoon of the juice you counted on drinking, and it being particularly hard to serenely accept when you’re not sure if your mom is convinced she has anything to look forward to living for.
I’ve been using all this ink to cope by journaling and sketching out some of the idea-foundations of work I need to do to make money, but tonight it seems so ridiculous and beautiful and decadent and pathetic.
Do you know what I mean?
