Loving, valuing, and WANTING brown adds urgency to acquiring and using fountain pens.
Mmmmmmm …. makes me hungry for root beer barrels, caramel & maple syrup on fluffy pancakes!
This is sunlight shining through a bottle of Diamine Triple Chocolate fountain pen ink.
Brown is gravy, skin, soil, feathers, mushrooms, spices, leather, nuts, fur, tree bark and wood. Brown is coffee, tea and chocolate. Moths, dehydrated fruits and floating seed pods. Brown is the bottoms of currents of wind, of dust that stirs and tells you the direction.
And white: just doesn’t exist. And all black is just brown when you look really closely: putting on airs, trying to hide its true nature. A mask of damage control parading as sophistication.
Brown expands and contracts with the capacity to hug you. Brown is a strong winking flexing sphincter. Brown feels rich like a softly growing form of gold, the walls of a private cave lined with blankets where you go to be safe or make babies. Brown is the incubator. The enclosure you can push against to make just the right amount of breathing room.
Brown is precious without the high prices. Not the metals man makes, but stones, earth and oil. Brown is common, accessible, attainable and never ever loses value, worth more and more as it hardens, petrifies. Brown is autumn when all of the storehouses are fulll: you have done enough for now. Brown is the days of resting in riches. Upper lip fuzz and the end of a good day worn well behind the ears.
I can never understand why it is so hard to find anything in brown. Brown cars, brown clothes, brown binders, brown jewelry. Why brown has been made fun of my whole life as though the seventies invented it. Like it has no style. The candies the crayons that nobody wanted, the crappy car colors they think have no flair. But truth is just that most peopledo not know what is good and long-lasting or what makes sense on your tongue when there is silence enough to taste it.
It should not be so hard to find brown ink pens. But … it is. Brown ink seems to me like it should be THE default color. Of timelessness. It is classic. It is the first old words still breathing on paper (okay maybe that’s not true maybe that’s … like … ebony or kohl or something; I will take this question on a curiosity adventure sometime).
Brown is a stick you can draw with in the dirt. Arrows and runes and money made of mud bricks. Magic wands. Dried blood and mortality and rebirth through iron. The dark wet shadows written on onion skin and parchment.
Brown — my love and unquenched desire for brown — may be my biggest motivator to collect fountain pens; I want more brown. I want it all of the time. And the best way to get it is BY THE INK BOTTLE, with the ability to fill pens up with brown myself. Non-disposable pens. Beautiful BROWN (and green and red and black and white) pens in beautiful special materials you can’t get just anywhere and that will feed me line after swirl after dot after circle after smudge after puddle of beautiful rich BROWN.
Curious how my quest to collect brown is going? I have a long way to go, but I got started with a couple of brown ink samples and this post about brown and blue describing the kinds of browns I’m looking for first.
