The Pencil

There is a deep familiarity between pencil and hand.

Our bodies fit perfectly. Pencil’s hexagon shape responds immediately to the embrace of our fingers. Always we are eager for one another, make something new each time we touch. Pencil’s scent never fails to arouse. For long hours we follow trails of a thought, momentum of a narrative, surprise of a poem, intrigue of words.

We mark. We pause. We erase.

We mark. We erase. We pause.

Within these pauses are other intimacies: Pencil tucked into the privacy behind our ear, welcomed by our parting lips, flicked by our tongue, gripped between our teeth.

Sometimes teeth push through yellow-thin skin to savory wood: it is we who leave marks.

A relatively new invention, pencil has become so integral to our everyday lives as to be overlooked in most encyclopedias and books documenting the histories of inventions. Jacques-Nicolas Conte developed pencil during the first half of the 16th century in France. Inspired by the necessities of his dual professions of illustrator (art) and biologist (science), pencil consisted of carbon (necessary to life and present in more than one million chemical compounds) and cedar (the sacred tree of many ancient and indigenous societies).

Art & science. Cedar & carbon. Sacred & secular.

The equilibrium of pencil: pencil requires the right play between hand, point, page, and our writing surface. Just like conversation, it must be taut yet flowing. If we press too hard, its point snaps— like a tense word breaks our trust.

Pencil, Latin, penicillus, brush, diminutive of penis,‘small tail’.

Like the tail signal vocabulary of dog, cat, and wolf, pencil marks signal one another on the page. Narrative turns on the precision of tail-word signals like the encounters of dogs meeting in a park.

Pencil embodies the temporality of narrative (which must be endlessly renewed or re-formed), for with usage we watch pencil decrease. Pencil signals time’s passage, urging us on to the next word, the next page. Our hand intimately knows a particular, curious, accumulating sadness as pencil becomes smaller, smaller, until it is too small to hold. Reluctantly, we throw pencil stub away. Wonder what its final two inches might have enabled us to write.

With the 180 degrees back & forth turning of pencil, we inscribe & obliterate, create & destroy. Alpha & Omega. Pencil embodies the inter-dependant relationship of existence as not opposites but crests & troughs of being; of knowing & forgetting.