Red Room Where the Writers Are

Have you ever sat outside at night dipping a manuscript into the furious tongue of a Zippo?  How about hovering your spade thumb over the backspace, a vast square of blue highlight glowing over the text?  Perhaps you sit there, the flame deviling your face, and think it'd be better if it were all white page bursting forth.  The white page is the epitome of possibility, wide open, not marred with mistake and bad decisions, not hacked with a teenage typography.

When I was a kid, pressing the keys impaled a page with a letter.  I wrote on an old manual typewriter that I bought at an antique shop for fifteen dollars.  The loud clatter of that machine made me feel elegant and real in a way that wouldn't work now.  The K on that typewriter always ripped the paper, slamming into it with such force it came out the other side.  I had a bitchy character named Katrina and she literally tore into each page on which she appeared.  I enjoyed how one had to jab the keys with authority so they arced with enough force to drive the ink into the paper, a tattoo of thought and hope.  One doesn't have that so much now.  I write on the computer, scribble in my notebook.  It seems as if we are always separated from our letters, that we compose them through glass.  Often we don't look upon them as part of ourselves.  They are the text, an object.  What does the text want?  What is the text attempting to say?  I'm not certain it has always been this way.  Words on a computer are made transitory by the medium of their composition.  Often they sound like wind through a hollow bone.  How do we reach our words again, call them home?  Let us lurch toward this sort of touching again.  Break the glass.

One had to think before striking a key on that typewriter because a mistake involved a hefty bundle of minutes for correction.  I hated Liquid Paper.  I retyped the page in its entirety.  Many afternoon hours flowed by retyping the same sentences over and over.  Now, I take that approach, not in the writing, but in the editing.  I print it out, unable to edit or read on the computer.  I mark up the page with my pen, make the corrections, and print it out again.  Over and over, at least on the stories.  It makes me feel as if there's been an effort exerted, a chance that the sentence is worthy of the damage it does to a page.

When the whiteness of a page has been trampled by words, the possibility that was present has been stolen and shaped, forced into a particular state.  Looking at writing this way, each click of the keyboard is step away from freedom, a stave closer to a determined universe.  What does it mean then if you dip the corner of that manuscript into the flame?

Of course, as with many things, the opposite is true as well.  Without the black chain of words, the page does not coalesce into being and form.  It is only allowed its being by the restrictions the alphabet leverages against the infinite possibility.  

I was thinking these flighty things this morning as I drove my son to a class he attends on Thursday.  No easy feat considering he won't shut up in the car now.

"Dad," he said from the back seat, sniffing his fingers. "One hand smells like metal and the other smells like petting the cat."

Right then my world changed.  I lurched from the white world of the philosophical thought, a place in which I really shouldn't spend much time.  A crumb vibrated on the console.  I felt closer to letters.  I looked back at him in the rear-view mirror, at his cheeks round like the curves of baseballs and his hair like commas gathered on his scalp, and I'm suddenly and viciously glad that I slipped my thumb off the tab that held the life of the flame last night and dropped the heat away from the corner of the manuscript.

What else do I have?  It is the way it is.  I put the manuscript away, to let it age in darkness instead of making a decision now.  On my next approach, perhaps I'll be a different person making the attempt.  Hopefully, I'll be better.  That glass can crack at any moment.  A Katrina may rage onto the page.  My son, though he didn't realize it, tendered me a morsel of wisdom today.  It is a thing I must remember.  Some days a hand may smell like metal, but on others like petting the cat.