Glyphs
Consider this post an interlude, like so many other interludes. We celebrated Canada Day this week—and Wednesday suddenly felt like Saturday which feels-like-any-other-day-these-days-anyway. But I digress.
Last night I watched a documentary: California Typewriter. Actually I fell asleep before it ended so I’ll finish it tonight. Got 30 minutes to go. This isn’t a commentary on the film...I was just bone tired.
I’ve owned two typewriters in my lifetime, generic objects whose identity I’ve long since forgotten. I don’t know where they ended up either...probably discarded between apartments, without any hint of a second thought. Offerings to the altar of obsolescence. I know the last one was electric and I think it had a small LCD screen too—to fix typos? It’s all blurry now. Sounds like heresy though…a frankenhybrid borne of corporate desperation.
In the film there’s a sculptor who specializes in using typewriter parts to create his artwork. And he reminisces about his first childhood experiences with these machines, how they looked like tiny self-contained mechanical cities, a mysterious country he secretly wished to inhabit. Lang’s Metropolis. I have no recollection of a family typewriter growing up—which is strange, actually. My dad used to write quite a bit and an old typewriter would’ve made complete sense in our home.
Who knows? Maybe that altar got especially greedy one day, before we were born or semi-conscious.
But when I did get one—the first, mechanical model—even as a young adult, I heard this siren song the artist speaks of. I remember that intricate labyrinth, the flash of steel spewing black glyphs on paper, the rhythm of words made flesh and reverberating. Living and singing and dying on a backbeat.
Before going to sleep I opened Safari and searched for “typewriters” at the local Staples. Because of course I did. No machines, a few accessories/ribbons etc. The US store had some, most with terrible ratings but I didn’t investigate further. This was a flight of fancy.
I worry about our history as footprints in a winter storm. We can’t go back, not now, not really. We won’t, anyway.
And yet there will come a spring and there will be a thaw.
And those hills will flow
with rushing water.
