On Writing (As Opposed To Typing) At The Library

Commonplace Newsletter #49

I’ve started going to the library to write, and I’ve started- despite referring to myself as a writer for several years now- to actually write, that is to draft thoughts from my head onto a sheet of paper via a pencil held in my unsure hand. I can’t recall the last time I actually wrote something longer than a grocery list.

In my dayjob we used to write daybooks- that is, via actual physical books that you wrote logs and reports in several times per day- but even this last bastion, this last holdout was replaced by in-house smartphones and apps a years or two ago. So now you check off tasks with the tap of a button and you thumb-type autocorrected entries several times per day. It’s easier this way, quicker. But something is lost along the way. Which is of course a motif that has run through these weekly pieces for almost a year now.

Now. My pencil is sharpened, my seat in the second floor study area of the library is secured. So let’s write about writing. Let’s see what happens…

---

The Walk To The Library

Being that I am sick of the hyperabundant time I spend online endlessly panning the shit-river of information in the vain hope of sifting out the odd nugget of information or- imagine- wisdom, I am instead trying to base what I think about on what I actually see with my own eyes. I am trying to actually see and think with my no-longer-hyper stimulated brain. And so what I just noticed on the walk to the library was something I see all the time but have never fully registered or considered much before. And that is this- everyone wears glasses today it seems. Young, old, male, female, overweight, underweight.

The society of the spectacle indeed. And this doesn’t take into account the secret contingent of contact lens wearers.

I know I overstate my case here but it is something to at least ponder. I counted 11 spectacle wearers on my 15 minute morning walk to the city centre library out of a sample of maybe 30-something people (I was mainly slow-walking and off in my own head- no claim I have ever made here has ever purported to be scientific). Now, given the time of day, the neighbourhood I live in and the route I took I also counted four separate stumbling, mumbling, homeless or at least precariously houses morning drunks and I have not yet necessarily concluded that England is a nation of derelict alcoholics. Not necessarily anyway.

But to get back to my point (pencil and paper is doing nothing to diminish my ability to speak in parenthetical asides and meander off-topic. If anything it might be making it worse). Lots and lots of people seem to wear glasses is the point, and I’m not sure this was the case a few decades ago. Now, some of this could be fashion. Some of this could be second order effects from early Noughties anti-bullying initiatives that have embolden our hypermetropic and myopic friends to proudly sport thick Elvis Costello frames. And good for them, I say. But you never used to see so many prescription glasses wearers, is my point. Something must have changed.

Further, when I talk to family, work colleagues, member of the burgeoning cult of personality I am trying to build around myself I hear lots of talk about neck problems, shoulder problems, lower back problems. From persistent daily issues to occasional annoying twinges, these are hardly, if ever, the consequences or acute injury or foolhardy overexertion. They are the chronic consequences of living the way that we do. The neck and the shoulder are invariably from constantly hunching and looking down at our ubiquitous devices for long hours, and the back pain and pelvic tilt from a life spent I n sofas, swivel chairs, drivers seats, economy flights. I can’t think of a different reason. This is what my eyes tell me.

And my eyes also tell me that screens are a problem. I’ve been clocking 3 hour plus sessions at the computer/ iPad in addition to an evening movie most nights and I quite simply cannot see as well as I used to. I’ve been blessed with good vision- touch wood- and a damn near elite level attention span cultivated via an analogue childhood in the pre-WiFi and notification bell 90’s and early 00’s. But I feel them ending now. Perhaps this is true for everyone. Perhaps this is why contemporary art and audiences are the way they are. In any case this is why I am at the library now, pencil in hand. Restoration.

---

A Glimpse Of The Process

It’s just before 11am according to the massive clock mounted on the far left wall. I have to crane my neck slightly around a column to see it. I arrived here at around 0930, give or take. An hour and a half to get down what I’ve gotten down so far. I have no frame of reference for whether this represents a laughably plodding or shamefully rushed and harried pace. My contemporaries are all lost in Contentland, the mimetic hall of mirrors. There is no competition, in both sense of that phrase.

Man, I’m bored.

And not in that low level, high dopamine tolerance way that you can become if you are a content creator (May God have mercy on our souls) who has habituated himself to to the round robin loop of emails> Discord> analytics> Stripe dashboard > YouTube videos> emails > Discord…

No. I am properly bored. For the first time in a long time. I have engineered this situation. No devices. No music. No source material to refer to. No things to look up to help me. Just me, myself and I. And the pencil and the page.

(I am now at the top of page four- eyeballing it I reckon reaching the bottom of this intimidatingly long page will net me around 1200 words. Which will do).

I have engineered this situation. I wanted this.

The weather outside the window that surround me- seagull shit smeared though they are- looks gorgeous. A panorama of trees dappled with streaks of sunlights and shade. The gentlest of breezes making them slow-wave. I wanted this. I chose to do this to myself.

Either side of my table is the clickclacking of laptop keys by young student-looking types. It’s rhythmic and assured and competent. Unlike my own prior two finger hunt-and-peck.

But this pencil is moving fluidly. It’s coming back. The dusty neural roads not ridden since school are being swept clean. You can’t make typos with handwriting I’m learning. You can misspell but you won’t write the wrong letter when you meant to write another. There’s something to be said for that. The bottom of the page looms.

Maybe I’ll spend the rest of the day in this analogue world, in the IRL, in this meatspace. A park, a pint, a walk, a wander. Whatever. Adhedonia fades. Maybe the dopaminergic system is fixing itself already? Probably not yet. But what do I know?

I notice I have leaned on the word ‘I’ a lot in this one. Perhaps this is a tic, perhaps the first person is a refuge, as comfortable as pentatonic noodling is for the middling guitar player. But we all have to start somewhere. And as it was for Montaigne, the original and still best essayist, perhaps the ideal place to start is with ‘I’. Because that’s how it feels with this pencil and this paper and this sunny morning.

It feels like I’m just beginning.

---

---