Writing, Drawing, Seeing

In the 1920s, in an anthology of short texts compiled under the sign of friendship, Walter Benjamin lists "The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses." Here are parts of two of them:

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. . . .

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.¹

I first read these lines with a startled flush: someone shared with me a secret vice. For a long time I have adhered pedantically to certain pens and papers—to cheap fountain pens (say, now, the Pilot Varsity) and to index cards or bound tablets with grid-lines (say, Exacompta 4 x 7's or Moleskines). The grid-lines are important to me: I need to register not just thoughts, but their relations. I need to be able to diagram, even to sketch, what I hope to write—or to see through writing.

What Benjamin calls pedantry, I think of as ritual—or, rather, as liturgy. The cycles of daily prayer I know best, versions of the Christian "office" or liturgy of the hours, begin with the formula, "O Lord, open my lips." The familiar phrase can become tedious, mechanical, but its familiarity usually cues me to focus attention. Like street signs or landmarks on a daily journey: "I am starting off again into prayer. I recognize this. I know how to do this." Repetition calms me into concentration. The ritual phrase performs a deliberate dedication of time: "This is worth my time—that is, my life."

So it is with setting out my pens and my cards. Or listening, abstracted and intent, as the pen first begins to scratch, then to skate across the stiff, absorbent stock. These objects, these motions belong to the ritual circumstances of my writing. There are others: the free hour at dawn or near midnight, the empty room, the strict exclusion of noise. I have written in all kinds of times and places, of course, and at certain stages of revision I prefer to be on a laptop in a crowded coffee house around 10 a.m., the whole day promised to me. But if I am struggling for a first draft, striking water from desert rock, I go back to my ritual helps—and back to ink on paper.

My "pedantic adherence" to fountain pens and grid lines is partly pleasure. I take pleasure in paper textures, as various as skin. Like pale skin, too, in their depth, with veins of fiber or translucent watermarks. Tender and transitory, vulnerable to any number of designs. I delight in how paper takes ink, but even more in the freedom of my hand across the page. Writing by hand is always a kind of drawing.

The printed grid aligns my script. It also reminds me that my hand can inhabit every part of the page, grouping or separating words. Not only words: I juxtapose words with images or turn words into images. I need this visual help for the hardest thing in writing: finding a shape for the new text. I want to wrap this skin around a body.

Benjamin knew all about diagramming, though he doesn't mention it in his thirteen theses. Many of his archived notes look like printed pages, filled from top to bottom in microscopic script.² Other notes are lists or outlines or tables of contents. He plays with the space of the page to make concrete poetry. Parallel columns map ideas onto each other, but then correcting arrows rearrange. Benjamin draws boxes around leading thoughts or underscores them in different colors of pencil. Some lines of text run diagonally or vertically—jotted in as after-thoughts or else counter-voices that interrogate, complicate, and interrupt. There are flow charts of boxed words or ciphers for whole sets of ideas. Some days Benjamin draws pristine diagrams that resemble mandalas in their symmetrical synopsis. On other days, he treats his notes like a scrapbook. Into a narrative of his young son's games with language, Benjamin puts the boy's drawings of postage...