adventures in pen [jenna]

The flow of thought pauses, changes, skips back and forth between ideas, hesitant to settle on one for fear it will be anything less than the right one. The pen lifts, its scratching silent. The paper waits at ease.

The pen touches the paper again. Dim in the twilight, words take their place in rows across the page. Occasionally one bears a line drawn through it; occasionally a cluster of tiny words gathers outside of the main rows and marks its insertion with a small arrow.

The words may be secrets folded into the private sheets of a journal; they may form the short and jagged lines of a poem; they may carry the inventions of another world's history or commentary on the wiles and ways of our own. They may flow freely and naturally down the paper, as if it took no effort to place them; they may show the sharp strikes and dark substitutions of the violence wherewith they were extracted from the air.

Journal pages stay hidden, covers tightly closed and buried underneath the printed and bound words of others. The ideas reject revelation. A journal may prove treacherous, as it will open its secrets to any who take it up and read, but if carefully kept it may be a safe deposit for such things.

The lines and stanzas of poetry keep a rhythm of their own; long and short, long and short again. Perhaps those lines are marked over with tiny letters describing the melody and chords which give the cubing dimension to a song. A few words, lain across the top of the page, form the title. The paper holds its silence. The song always awaits a voice.

Invention of history may take the short form of only a few paragraphs or it may tell its tale through tens or hundreds or thousands of pages. It may take its writer in directions unintended or--more rarely--walk the path originally set before it; it may tell itself easily or its facts may have to be wrangled from the most awkward, difficult-to-reach corners of imagination. Its many words may provide understanding of those who have not walked the earth but could have, or they may go the way of Genesis and talk of worlds yet unknown to man--lands that foster impossible powers and sentient beings of strange, unusual description.

In the commentary upon this earth and its populace is often found the greatest weariness, the most haunting failures of transcendence. The pen may grow heavy, the pages burdensome, with the pressure of the words. A paragraph here, a sentence there, holds a thought twisted upwards, a sweet brief splendor of joy and hope.

Whatever else the words do, they search for magic--the magic to capture and transmit something more than mere fact. They search for the sense of melody, the atmosphere of the fairy world, though drawn in simple scrawls of black on white.

Again the pen lifts. The paper flips, and on its uneven and dented reverse, the pen touches again. Words take their place in rows across the page.